Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate and support the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on his crucially important Bill and declare an interest as a member of the Peers for the Planet group and vice-president of the RHS.

This Bill puts sustainability at the heart of our education system in response to the long-term, systemic challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. Over the last few years, young people have shown that they are hungry to learn and to act to protect their future and better prepare themselves to thrive in an ever-changing world. Evidence shows that engaging children and young people through school has a wider impact on community-level behaviour change. Behaviour change by the public is crucial to achieving emissions reduction, and childhood lasts a lifetime.

Teach the Future has been fighting and advocating for comprehensive education on the climate crisis and sustainability for all students, not just through the sciences and geography. Students need to be taught about the climate emergency and the ecological crisis—how they are caused, what we can do to mitigate them and what our future lives and jobs are going to look like due to them. Currently, the national curriculum makes narrow provision for factual knowledge on climate science and geography. There have been calls to create a GCSE in natural history, but this Bill goes further than that: it updates the curriculum to reflect the cross-cutting nature of climate change and to better support the learning approaches needed to build a resilient, well-informed and compassionate society ready to tackle these global challenges and be part of the solution.

By shifting the focus away from just citizenship to include sustainability, we can revitalise the subject and transform it into one that focuses on what young people care about and are keen to be involved in. It needs to become key content in all subject areas. Educators need to be trained in how to teach these difficult topics in a way that empowers students, and there needs to be the funding and resources to do this. The recent Green Jobs Taskforce report recommended that, as part of an integrated curriculum,

“government, employers and education providers should promote the effective teaching of climate change and the knowledge and skills … required for green jobs.”

Will the Government respond to this and action it as a priority?

I am an optimist and I believe we can invent our way out of the climate crisis we are facing. This Bill responds directly to the concerns of young people and addresses their future prosperity and well-being. We have a responsibility to act, to listen to them and, most of all, to press the reset button to change the world.