Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I first saw the title of this Bill, I shuddered because I thought it was going to say, “Let’s take something out of the curriculum and stick this in for the worthy cause.” Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, dealt with that in his opening remarks; I congratulate him on the elegant way in which he did it because, as many other people have gone through this, they have said that that is what normally happens. I have actually tried to pour cold water on numerous good causes that people have tried to stick into the national curriculum at various times. The noble Lord has found a way round this.

One thing I would say to the Minister is, “Accept it because it is a very good way out. If you’re going to do it some other way, it’s going to get very difficult.” Where could you not put the environment in? You can in history. You can look at when we started using coal and our transition and the way we reorganised our cities. Look at geography and the sciences. All of them would take more space if we accepted—and there seems to be general acceptance—that this is an important subject, and if we accepted the fact that it is an important subject because we have to change our behaviour. If you do not get people knowing why they have to change their behaviour, you get resistance to it. Making sure that your children know of somebody who has the eternal school project—let us put it like that; it is a great way of discovering something—is a way of knowing that you have to make that change. In getting into the school system, not only do you get the next generation; you also get the current one.

I hope the Minister will tell us that they have a plan that expands things without doing this. I rather doubt it; I think the noble Lord and the Minister are dealing with the same problem—of where this fits in. If there is another space we have not found, that is great, but it should be there. I say to the Minister that, looking back over what we have done in Parliament—I think I have been here longer than most—the biggest speech saying that we should take this subject seriously was made by Lady Thatcher, when she was still Prime Minister. We are tenants of the planet; we do not own it. We must take action and pass it on.

This is just one of those little ways you can fulfil that aim: making sure that everyone knows why we have to change the way we operate and live today. It is one way of making sure that that knowledge is embedded in society, so that we accept the change and get on with it.