Sustainability and Climate Change (National Curriculum)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) on the way she introduced this debate and on her good fortune in securing it. I also congratulate young people—not just the young people that are here, but young people everywhere, in that they are not angrier. They seem remarkably good-humoured, yet they should be extremely angry with the way that successive generations have left them a world that they are going to have to cope with. The problems that we have created are the problems that they will have to deal with. Certainly, if I look back to the things that angered me when I was in my teens and early 20s, had I been facing the sort of climate and environmental catastrophe that young people now are facing, I think I would have been even angrier than I was then.

What is good is that this debate has been cross-party and consensual. Nobody has stood up and said that there no need for us to teach about climate as an integral part of the curriculum. I echo what my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) said about the need for this to be holistic and to become an integrated way of teaching, not just a tick-box exercise within schools. It is vital that the relevance to people’s lives is made apparent.

Today we have the Budget, and I want to look to one element of hope, which is that the Treasury has finally come up with the Dasgupta review. This is an economic review commissioned by the Treasury to look into the integration of biodiversity and the natural world with economics—something that is long overdue. The report speaks about the way that we treat the environment as an “asset management problem”. What is perhaps most extraordinary about the Dasgupta review, apart from its length—at 605 pages, it is quite dense, with lots of formulae—is that, as an economist, having gone through all the economics and asset management problems and used all the formulae, he concluded that the oppressing issue was education. It is a Treasury report, yet Dasgupta concluded that the important issue was education: educating our children and educating the public. He talked about education on nature stretching from early years to university, with all universities mandating students to attend a basic course in ecology, and extending it beyond schools to adult workplaces and organisations, as everyone needs to recognise their role in restoring the natural world, and about a new GCSE in natural history, which was first proposed way back in 2012.

We must not treat the need for education about climate and the environment as separate from everything else the Government do. If it is seen in the Treasury as a driving force of our economy, then that is how we, as politicians, should regard it. That is why it is so important to integrate it into all that we do.

The right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne)—who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East said, has guided the Environmental Audit Committee so brilliantly as its Chairman—has said that the Government have not yet stepped up to the plate in terms of the necessary skills. We know that the Government’s 25-year environment plan and the measures in the Environment Bill will need much greater ecological expertise at a local authority level. Biodiversity net gain for new developments and the creation of local nature recovery networks are good steps, but they cannot be delivered without the necessary in-house ecological expertise.

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for nature, I wrote earlier this year to all local council chief executives to ask for their assessment of their in-house ecological expertise. I am afraid that, based on the overwhelming response we received, local authority leaders do not believe they can deliver on the Government’s ambitions. The situation has not changed significantly since 2013, when a study by the Association of Local Government Ecologists, ALGE, found that only one in three councils had access to the necessary expertise.

We need to develop the education and skills necessary for that expertise. The Government cannot impose obligations on local authorities and in the planning system without the capacity to deliver on those targets. If we do not train the necessary people, those targets will be meaningless and we will fail. It is vital that we see education as the pump-priming part in the delivery of the targets set in the Environment Bill and the net zero strategy.

In the Government’s response to the Dasgupta review, they mentioned the newly established sustainability and climate change unit under the Department for Education. However, as the chairman of the EAC said, the Committee’s latest inquiry on green jobs was quite clear that the Government are not grappling with the skills gap needed to achieve net zero. I hope the Minister prioritises the new unit and that it will be able to bridge the gap between the skills shortage and the demand, including through education and retraining of the current workforce, who will be affected by the changes, and where we need a just transition.

I cannot pass up the opportunity to meet the swift mentioned by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and the skylark that my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North mentioned, and to raise them with an Arctic tern, which of course flies from the Arctic summer to the Antarctic summer. It actually traverses the globe once a year, flying 55,900, and in a lifetime flies many times the distance to the moon and back. It would be good to debate the amazing function of our birdlife and the loss of birdlife that we have seen in this country.

To pick up on something that my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North said, many of us remember as children being able to go into the countryside and see so many different species. In a sense, we have raised a generation of battery-reared children who have been cosseted and protected, with parents afraid to let their children go out and play on their own. That is a great loss to the world. An environmental premium for schools, as spoken about by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), is a really good idea.

Teach the Future asks for a Government-commissioned review of how the whole English formal education system is preparing students for the climate emergency and ecological crisis, the inclusion of the climate emergency and ecological crisis in teacher training and a new professional teaching qualification, and an English climate emergency education Act. I hope the Minister will respond to those three asks.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (in the Chair)]

We have the Arctic tern, the skylark and the swift. Mr Jim Shannon, it is over to you now.