High-Quality and Evidence-Informed Curriculum for Climate Change and Environmental Education in Schools
Climate change and environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss and plastic pollution, are some of the most pressing issues of our time, with far-reaching implications for current and future generations. As such, there is an urgent demand to equip children and young people with a deep understanding of these topics through comprehensive, equitable and high-quality education. This statement presents an evidence-informed case for the careful and meaningful integration of climate change and environmental education into the National Curriculum, highlighting current challenges, the demand, and proposing evolutionary next steps.
The current landscape: Challenges and shortcomings
Inconsistent and insufficient climate change and environmental education in schools
Despite strong demand from teachers, parents, children and young people (Gillow et al., 2022), teachers feel they lack the necessary knowledge, support, and materials to confidently teach such content to a high standard (Greer et al., 2023). Additionally, heavy workload, academic performance pressures, and post-pandemic recovery efforts frequently push climate change and environmental education to the margins, preventing them from being prioritised as part of a balanced curriculum within the classroom (Gillow et al., 2022).
Gaps in curriculum coverage
A significant issue in the current National Curriculum in England is that content on climate change, sustainability, and environmental issues is only explicitly included at key stages 3 and 4, with no explicit references to this content in primary education or other secondary subjects. For example, at key stage 3, science and geography directly address human impacts on the climate and resource use, while key stage 4 science focuses on anthropogenic causes and mitigation strategies for climate change. However, in key stages 1 and 2, any connections to these topics are inferred rather than made explicit, for example teaching about weather in key stage 1. This approach to curriculum relies on teachers introducing climate change and environmental concerns without an established national and coherent standard of content to guide them.
Furthermore, the coverage of climate change, sustainability, and environmental education in the National Curriculum is largely limited to three subjects: science, geography, and design and technology, leaving areas of the curriculum with direct conceptual links to climate change, sustainability and environmental education underexplored. This results in missed opportunities to integrate these critical topics across subjects.
This current approach creates a risk of confusion and fragmentation, as implicit links do not guarantee a coherent, sequenced or consistent approach to climate change and environmental education. Without explicit standards across key subjects at primary and secondary, the integration of climate change and environmental education risks becoming ad-hoc and unstructured, lacking the coherence necessary for a high-quality and comprehensive understanding across educational stages.
The risks of competency-based or skills-focused approaches
A shift towards competency-based or skills-based curricula approaches, which emphasise generic competencies like "critical thinking skills", "problem solving" and "systems thinking" risks reducing climate change and environmental education to a superficial agenda rather than a curriculum underpinned by key concepts (Eilam, 2024). This approach risks diluting subject disciplines, promoting superficial cross-curricular strategies that obscure the unique insights that subjects such as history and art contribute to understanding climate change and environmental education.
Christodoulou (2011) further emphasises that skills and knowledge are inextricably linked, and any curriculum that marginalises knowledge undermines the very foundation upon which meaningful and lasting skills are built. This is further supported by Frick et al. (2004), who recognise the necessary but insufficient role of knowledge in climate change and environmental education. They argue that merely targeting declarative knowledge is inadequate for informing environmental behaviour decisions; instead, this form of knowledge must be broken down into its component parts to better address the complexities of decision-making processes in response to environmental challenges.
Together, the evidence suggests that knowledge cannot be marginalised in climate change and environmental education, especially when addressing complex issues like microplastics infiltrating human organs and ecosystems (Ziani et al., 2023), or ocean acidification disrupting marine life and food security (Falkenberg et al., 2020).
Knowledge must be treated as a foundational component, carefully structured to support all children and young people to understand complex and rapidly changing environmental issues.
Climate denial and misinformation
Persistent and widespread climate denial still exists and continues to undermine climate change and environmental education efforts (Mendy et al., 2024). Ideological resistance to climate science, psychological difficulty in accepting the reality of climate change, and the spread of misinformation through digital channels (Lluis de Nadal, 2024) makes it harder for children and young people to navigate the evolving nature of this complex knowledge base as it permeates and intersects with multiple subjects. This challenge is further complicated by the need to continually update and adapt knowledge to counter misinformation and address our evolving understanding of how planetary boundaries continue to be breached.
Lack of evidence base with methodological rigour for changes in behaviour through climate change and environmental education
In a recent paper, Galeotti et al., 2024 highlight that the existing research on climate change education reveals significant methodological weaknesses that hinder the ability to draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of educational interventions. While a substantial body of literature exists, it is undermined by several key issues.
Firstly, climate change interventions are highly heterogeneous, varying greatly in content, quality, and implementation, which complicates comparisons across studies. Additionally, many studies lack randomisation, with only a minority employing control groups; instead, they often rely on pre-post evaluations that are susceptible to biases, such as demand effects and social desirability.
Furthermore, a significant focus on measuring changes in knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, rather than actual behaviour, raises questions about the real-world impact of these education interventions. Measurement issues also pose challenges in accurately assessing environmentally oriented behaviours and norm-related beliefs.
Moreover, selection bias may occur since individuals who choose to participate in interventions often already hold pre-existing environmental attitudes that can skew results. Lastly, the lack of long-term follow-up in many studies limits understanding of whether behavioural changes are sustained over time (Galeotti et al., 2024). Considering the challenges of balancing limited teacher capacity with the need to achieve meaningful outcomes for children and young people, it is essential to establish an explicit and shared understanding of what constitutes high-quality evidence in climate change and environmental education. Teachers often lack the time, training, and resources to evaluate what approaches are most effective, highlighting the importance of clearly defining both the strengths and limitations of existing research. This clarity is crucial for guiding how curricula should be implemented in classrooms to ensure long-term impact.
Viable and coherent next steps: A knowledge-rich and balanced approach
A principled, coherent, and subject-specific curriculum
To address the challenges in climate change and environmental education, a curriculum should be both principled and coherent, ensuring that children and young people are taught a rich body of knowledge. A principled curriculum emphasises depth over breadth, integrating climate change and environmental themes meaningfully into subjects such as science, geography, design and technology, history, and art, rather than dispersing these topics thinly across various subjects.
Coherence, in this context, refers to the logical and structured sequencing of content that ensures connections between subjects and concepts are explicit, leading to a comprehensive understanding of climate change and environmental issues. This approach respects the unique contributions of each discipline, ensuring that curriculum implementation is grounded in subject-specific knowledge. Furthermore, the curriculum must clearly distinguish between primary and secondary content, with primary education focusing on foundational and concrete concepts, and secondary education engaging with more abstract or contested topics (Hoath and Dave, 2024).
Acknowledging complexity: Identifying concrete, abstract, and contested knowledge
Shepardson et al. (2011) emphasise the importance of addressing children and young peoples’ incomplete or incorrect mental models of climate change, which ultimately lead to misconceptions. For instance, children and young people may incorrectly believe that carbon dioxide forms a layer that absorbs heat or that climate change, global warming, and the greenhouse effect all mean the same thing (Leighty, 2024).
These incomplete mental models impede the ability of children and young people to grasp the complexity of climate change and its various impacts and solutions. Additionally, it is important to acknowledge that the intricate nature of the Earth's climate system poses a significant challenge, as it involves complex interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, ice, land, and living organisms. Effectively teaching this complexity to children and young people requires clear explanations of concepts such as the Earth's energy budget, feedback mechanisms, and the varying timescales of climate change. The temptation of using superficial, resource-driven pedagogical responses in place of a well-designed curricula risks the emergence of multiple misconceptions and shallow learning. Without a solid understanding of the key concepts, attempts to teach about environmental issues such as climate change may not be high quality or ambitious enough for our children and young people.
It is also critical that climate change and environmental education delineates between concrete knowledge, abstract concepts, and contested ideas to help children and young people develop both accurate and complex mental models. Concrete knowledge includes well-established facts and principles of climate science, such as the greenhouse effect, global warming, and the scientific consensus on human- caused climate change. This foundation supports children and young people to build on their knowledge, leading to deeper engagement with abstract questions related to decarbonisation and adaptation. Exploring contested ideas as this knowledge and understanding grows ensures a more coherent curricula sequence. Such ideas could involve exploring the notion of attaining sustainability as disputed, the feasibility of mitigation versus adaptation strategies, differing opinions on carbon credits, and the role of activism in shaping public policy. This approach not only encourages deeper understanding over time but also involves ethical work, as it encourages thoughtful, informed engagement with the complexities of climate change and environmental education, rather than simply adopting polarised or simplistic viewpoints.
Evidence pointing towards knowledge-rich climate change and environmental education
Curriculum levers through national policy
Plutzer et al. (2024) conducted a longitudinal study using two nationally representative surveys of U.S. middle school science teachers in 2014 and 2019, with results revealing that the adoption of rigorous science standards, particularly the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), significantly improved climate change instruction in schools. Teachers in NGSS-adopting states demonstrated a marked increase in addressing climate change, with the percentage dedicating at least one class session to recent global warming rising from 65% to 81% and average instructional hours increasing by 3.4 hours, reaching 8.3 hours.
Research like this demonstrates evidence for the critical role of clear national standards in guiding effective climate change and environmental education, especially within the context of English education policy and the Curriculum and Assessment Review.
Towards coherence: An evidence-informed curriculum framework
CAPE’s evidence-informed curriculum framework (Hoath and Dave, 2024) emphasises the importance of three key mechanisms: knowledge, collective action and self-regulation. A core foundation of knowledge should be integrated across various subjects to create a climate-adapted curriculum that leverages existing disciplines such as science, geography, design and technology, art and history.
As we have already explored, knowledge alone is an insufficient, though necessary, foundation. Children and young people must also feel a sense of responsibility towards the planet by understanding how to take collective action to protect the environment. This includes applying knowledge in practical ways, such as calculating their school’s carbon footprint, implementing nature-based solutions, and engaging in curriculum-linked enrichment activities with partners, such as educational collaborations with local wind farms. Additionally, with increasing eco-anxiety among children and young people (Hickman, 2021), self-regulation is a crucial mechanism. It involves teaching children and young people to cope with the psychological impacts of climate change and wider environmental issues, recognise misinformation, and build resilience, while maintaining hope in the face of environmental challenges.
Knowledge, therefore, should be viewed as a broader concept, incorporating not only system knowledge - the understanding of how environmental systems interact - but also action knowledge, which empowers children and young people to know what actions they can take to influence outcomes, and effectiveness knowledge, which helps them analyse the potential impact of their decisions. A comprehensive approach to climate change and environmental education requires addressing all types of knowledge within the curriculum (Frick et al., 2004).
Our recommendations
1. Establish national standards: Develop explicit national standards for climate change and environmental education across all key stages to provide a coherent and consistent framework for teachers. This includes incorporating content explicitly into primary and secondary curricula, ensuring structured and progressive learning across educational stages.
2. Leverage national policy: Use evidence from frameworks like the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to inform English education policy, demonstrating the role of clear national standards in improving the quantity and quality of climate change and environmental instruction.
3. Build methodological rigour in research: Establish a shared national understanding of what constitutes high-quality evidence in climate change and environmental education. Address methodological limitations in current studies by incorporating randomisation, control groups, and long-term follow-ups to evaluate the real-world impact of educational interventions.
4. Adopt a knowledge-rich, coherent curriculum: Emphasise depth over breadth in climate change and environmental education by integrating it meaningfully into various subjects (e.g., science, geography, history, and art). This approach ensures a structured sequencing of concepts, distinguishing between foundational knowledge for primary education and abstract or contested ideas for secondary education.
5. Balance knowledge and skills: Avoid overemphasising generic skills like "critical thinking" or "systems thinking" at the expense of subject-specific knowledge. Instead, integrate these skills into a curriculum underpinned by foundational knowledge to ensure meaningful and lasting learning outcomes.
6. Address gaps in curriculum coverage: Expand beyond the current focus on science, geography, and design and technology to include other disciplines with direct conceptual links to climate change, environmental education and sustainability. This avoids fragmentation and ensures an interdisciplinary approach that leverages the unique contributions of each subject.
7. Link knowledge to action: Incorporate action knowledge (what actions can be taken) and effectiveness knowledge (how to evaluate the impact of actions) into curricula. Provide practical opportunities for children and young people to apply their learning, such as carbon footprint calculations or engagement with local environmental initiatives.
8. Combat misinformation and climate denial: Equip children and young people to recognise misinformation and navigate complex and evolving knowledge bases.
9. Address eco-anxiety with self-regulation strategies: Incorporate mechanisms for psychological resilience and hope, helping children and young people cope with eco-anxiety while maintaining an active and positive engagement with environmental challenges.
10. Respond to demand with precision: Avoid vague frameworks and overly broad terms like ‘sustainability’. Instead, focus on precise curriculum areas, such as the science of climate change or the historical context of fossil fuel industries, to build a rigorous foundation for climate change and environmental education.
References
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