Biodiversity

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Carrington and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, in emphasising education, which is where Professor Dasgupta ends his report. Education is the foundation for all that we are required to do. We have been asked to make some very substantial changes in the way that we live and run the world. To do that, we are going to need a great deal of common understanding and consent. To achieve that, we are going to need an education system that equips our children with an understanding of nature and a real familiarity with it, so that they value it and it is part of their lives. They need to have an inherent understanding of why they are being asked to make room for it and the value of sharing their lives with it.

I know that this is not my noble friend the Minister’s responsibility but I really hope that she will find a way to get this message through to the Department for Education: there is something you can do here. You have in front of you a natural history GCSE, put together by OCR and very widely supported; we would like to see that starting in schools in September 2022. You need to do something now to let it through. I know that this is a hard time, and that this is not the easiest moment to focus on starting a new GCSE, but we all need to put our weight behind regenerating the environment. You, the Department for Education, have your bit to do, too.

A related suggestion that I would make to the same department, but via Defra, is that Defra should put some serious support behind the Queen’s Green Canopy. That is intended to involve every school in the country in celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee by planting trees and hedges. Schools are in no shape to do this well without finance or support. Put some money behind it and you will get every school in the country responding. Without money, it gets very difficult to do anything significant.