Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that the national curriculum includes (a) sustainable development and (b) project-based learning to encourage practical experience.

The Department reformed the National Curriculum to set world class standards across all subjects.

The National Curriculum focuses on the key knowledge that schools should teach. Within this broad statutory framework, schools have considerable flexibility to organise the content and delivery of the curriculum to meet the needs of the majority of their pupils.

In April 2022, the Department published ‘Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems’. The strategy sets out new initiatives, including extra support, for teaching nature and climate change, the introduction of a natural history GCSE, a National Education Nature Park, Climate Action Award, and support for head teachers to take a whole school approach to climate change.

The National Education Nature Park will bring together all the land from across the education sector into a vast virtual nature park. It will enable pupils to get involved in taking practical action to improve biodiversity and see over time how the virtual park changes. The initiative will provide many educational opportunities for pupils to take part in biodiversity monitoring, mapping, and data analysis, developing excellent knowledge for the future, underpinned by a strong foundation in mathematics.

The Department is drafting subject content for the proposed natural history GCSE and aims to consult publicly on this in the coming months.

Topics related to climate change and the environment are already included within the citizenship, science, and geography National Curriculum programmes of study.

The Department has no plans to promote project based learning in schools. The Department is committed to evidence based teaching and has recently re-endowed the Education Endowment Foundation with £137 million to research and fund innovative approaches to improve teaching in schools, nurseries, and colleges. Their approaches are aimed at improving educational outcomes, especially for disadvantaged pupils. This supports teachers to make evidence led decisions and choose interventions that they know are effective and appropriate for their pupils. Schools can also refer to the Oak National Academy and the network of subject hubs for support with teaching an evidence based curriculum.

In the Schools White Paper, published in 2022, the Department committed not to make any changes to the National Curriculum for the remainder of this Parliament.