Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This short panel discussion was filmed by WORLDwrite volunteers at the Battle of Idseas festival in October 2022.
Education is one of our key weapons in the fight against climate change’, declared former education secretary Nadhim Zahawi while launching a brace of environmental initiatives in April this year. The new programme included a Natural History GCSE, which will ‘offer young people a chance to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of this amazing planet, its environment and how we can come together to conserve it’.
Whatever your views on environmentalism, this interventionist approach seems at odds with the government’s own concerns that politics be kept out of the classroom. Zahawi himself warned against political bias causing problems for the curriculum, arguing that ‘clearer guidance on political impartiality is just one part of my wider work to give children the best possible education’. The Department for Education’s policy paper recognises there are ‘different views and opinions’ about how to address climate change, and others have raised concerns over pupils being pressured into thinking a certain way during the School Strike protests.
Is teaching environmental initiatives an overdue curriculum innovation, or an attempt to recruit young children to a political viewpoint? Will pupils be allowed to question the policies that an environmentalist GCSE takes as a given, such as sustainability and Net Zero policies? Or during what many have described as an urgent global crisis, should teaching environmentalist practices become even more central to a future curriculum?
The speakers are:
Berry D’Arcy
Parent; home educator; environmental entrepreneur
Clare Page
Parent and researcher
Dr Alex Standish
Associate professor of geography education, University College London; co-author, What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth
The Chair is
Harley Richardson
Blogger, historyofeducation.net; organising committee, AoI Education Forum; author, The Liberating Power of Education
This short panel discussion was filmed by WORLDwrite volunteers at the Battle of Idseas festival in October 2022.
Education is one of our key weapons in the fight against climate change’, declared former education secretary Nadhim Zahawi while launching a brace of environmental initiatives in April this year. The new programme included a Natural History GCSE, which will ‘offer young people a chance to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of this amazing planet, its environment and how we can come together to conserve it’.
Whatever your views on environmentalism, this interventionist approach seems at odds with the government’s own concerns that politics be kept out of the classroom. Zahawi himself warned against political bias causing problems for the curriculum, arguing that ‘clearer guidance on political impartiality is just one part of my wider work to give children the best possible education’. The Department for Education’s policy paper recognises there are ‘different views and opinions’ about how to address climate change, and others have raised concerns over pupils being pressured into thinking a certain way during the School Strike protests.
Is teaching environmental initiatives an overdue curriculum innovation, or an attempt to recruit young children to a political viewpoint? Will pupils be allowed to question the policies that an environmentalist GCSE takes as a given, such as sustainability and Net Zero policies? Or during what many have described as an urgent global crisis, should teaching environmentalist practices become even more central to a future curriculum?
The speakers are:
Berry D’Arcy
Parent; home educator; environmental entrepreneur
Clare Page
Parent and researcher
Dr Alex Standish
Associate professor of geography education, University College London; co-author, What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth
The Chair is
Harley Richardson
Blogger, historyofeducation.net; organising committee, AoI Education Forum; author, The Liberating Power of Education
