Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for introducing it and for his clear and very compelling case in doing so. All citizens of the future need to understand about the twin challenges of biodiversity decline and climate change if they are to be responsible citizens. Younger people, to a large extent, understand the importance of these two issues but not all of them do, so this change to the curriculum needs to be universal.

Ofsted reports have shown that education for sustainability is often an add-on or end-of-year activity, rather than being embedded for all children throughout the year. This means that many children are denied the right to develop sustainable citizenship knowledge, skills and mindsets. That will have a real impact on individuals’ life chances, on communities, businesses and the economy, and on global Britain’s place in the world, so it is fundamental. I challenge the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, because we are talking about threading these issues through the entire knowledge, skills and attitudes base that children work with in their school careers. This is an existential threat that we are facing, not just an add-on or another thing to be levered into the curriculum.

As a Private Member’s Bill, the scope covered by it necessarily has to be focused, but I hope that the Minister will also respond on another way that our educational system needs to rise to the environmental challenge. Efforts to combat climate change and biodiversity decline will need to be heroic in their scale over the next decades. We will need a ready supply of new skills, and some old skills. I declare an interest as a patron of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management. I was its first chartered environmentalist and my registration number, of which I am very proud, is 001.

The Government are introducing a huge range of policy and legislative measures, right across departments, to deliver the objectives of the Climate Change Act and their 25-year environment plan. I will give one simple example of how that impacts on the need for skills. Policies on things such as biodiversity net gain, local nature recovery strategies and whatever planning system changes we will see when the Government eventually launch them will need ecologists, environmental data specialists and environmental mappers and modellers—probably more environmental lawyers, heaven help us.

Likewise, if we are to avoid the sort of catastrophe we have just seen in Belgium and Germany, climate change mitigation and adaptation will need green energy technologists and installers, experts in sustainable flood risk management, and skills in inventing and manufacturing electric vehicles, to name but a few. We in this country do not yet have a sustainability skills strategy, as called for by the Institute for Government this week. I hope that the Minister can tell us when we will get a skills strategy that will cope with the challenges.

I say “hope”; I share the outrage of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, at the Department for Education’s submission to the Select Committee on Environment and Climate Change, which we reviewed this week. It was pathetic. It was almost laughable, if it were not so serious, that the Department for Education is only just beginning to look at a systematic response over the next nine months. I hope that the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, will also help to correct that staggering lack of momentum on the part of that department.