Sustainability and Climate Change (National Curriculum)

Debate between Derek Thomas and Clive Lewis

Wednesday 27th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Derek Thomas]

I thank the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome). That is a great part of the world. When you live in west Cornwall, you do not travel much beyond London, unless you have to.

It is great to be able to speak in this debate, not least because schools in Cornwall are brilliant at raising awareness of climate change and the harm we do to our planet. I have received thousands of letters from schoolchildren setting out their concerns and asking pertinent questions about my commitment to this critical issue. When I was elected, I made myself a perhaps foolish promise that I would always write personally and individually to every child from whom I received a letter. I may regret that because it is a massive task, but well worth doing, because each letter contains real examples of why those children care about climate change.

I have visited many of the amazing schools across Cornwall. Mullion School introduced me to its eco-club and its technology to monitor the ice caps and what is happening in the coldest parts of our world, which are unfortunately heating up. Mounts Bay Academy’s tree-planting, polytunnel and plastic-free efforts have transformed the thinking in schools and homes. Nancledra school invited me very early on in 2016 to its eco-fair. Trythall school, where my children go, invited me to see the work it was doing with members of Women’s Institutes to make the school and their homes more environmentally friendly. Nearly all schools across my constituency have invited me to see their efforts to reduce plastic waste. We in Cornwall are fortunate to have Surfers Against Sewage, who do a great job with schools, and many schools around the country are following that example. Marazion School has actually taken me on beach cleans, which is a great joy, because the children are so much nearer to the stuff they are picking up than we are. As we get older, picking up these little plastic things becomes a challenge, so I recommend that my children go and clean up the waste we have made. I am joking. I am going to get shot in a minute.

The schools working with the Woodland Trust in my constituency have done a great job and planted thousands of trees in their grounds. Prior to the G7 summit in Carbis Bay, which many will remember, several schools in the area took the opportunity to put pressure not only on me as the local MP and other Cornish MPs, but on our Government and world leaders to take this more seriously, to accelerate action and to prepare properly for COP26.

We had a head start in our schools because of the way they have engaged our children in the need to decarbonise and to restore nature, but I want to talk about why that is important. My daughter, who is five, started school properly in September. If things go as planned, when she leaves formal education all new cars will be electric, homes will be powered by wind and heated by air; bottle deposit schemes will have replaced the the need for parents to give their children pocket money, the countryside will look and feel different, and the job opportunities will be very different. That is why we need to take seriously the need to teach about climate change and how to mitigate it formally in our classrooms.

As I have demonstrated in my constituency examples, teachers in Cornwall are already embracing with enthusiasm teaching about the impact of climate change, but I recognise that climate education needs to be extended, as Teach for the Future said, to include knowledge about how we abate the climate emergency and ecological crisis, how to deliver climate justice, and how to support students dealing with eco and climate anxiety. That is important, because I saw the worry on the faces of children I met when the school strikes were taking place. Climate education will reduce anxiety, as students will be empowered with information to tackle the problem.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich East—I mean for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome)—on securing this debate. Sorry, that was a Freudian slip: everywhere is Norwich to me. The hon. Gentleman is making a good speech, but does he agree that, just as we should teach our children about the climate crisis and its onset, we should do so in schools and classrooms that are not belching out carbon at the same time? Is it not critical that this Government get on top of that and decarbonise the education estate by 2030 at the latest?

[Derek Thomas]

I agree, and I welcome the intervention. When I was on the Environmental Audit Committee, we looked at various plans to decarbonise the public estate by 2032. That is a massive challenge and hugely expensive, but it is right that we should prioritise the places where our children learn. We know that in many places, our school estates are not fit for purpose in terms of the best learning experience, let alone the right thing for the environment. That is just one of the many significant challenges we face as we grapple with this vital issue.

Education on climate change is also about the opportunities available for the future. Cornwall offers a particular opportunity for our national and global efforts to decarbonise and switch to renewable ways of living. We have one of the world’s most important supplies of lithium. We have copper and tin-rich rock beneath our homes. In my constituency, we are led to believe, we have the third-richest tin and copper mine in the world. We have geothermal possibilities, allowing us to extract heat from the ground, and we are doing that at Jubilee Pool in Penzance. We are leaders in renewable energy and we produce some of the most sustainable food crops, dairy and meat. We have some of the most exciting potential for carbon sequestration on land and on the ocean floor, and we have the potential for a large but sustainable fishing fleet. Lack of education in schools on this presents a challenge to our ambitions.

Education should address how we shift to a greener way of living without costing the Earth. There is an interesting debate taking place in Cornwall, because as we consider extracting copper and tin once again and extracting lithium from dormant mines, and at geothermal, we are trying to understand whether the immediate environmental impact of carrying out this important work is worth the result of extracting the minerals that we need in all our devices and in renewable-energy batteries, and so on. There is a real argument that we need the education and the learning in our schools, as well as among the public, about the environmental impact of digging up the ground. What exactly is it? Is it worth it? Or is it better—I say this tongue in cheek—to just get things from China or elsewhere, where we have no control over how the stuff is extracted? Education in schools could really help understanding of how we balance getting to a greener living with the impact that we have to spend right now.