Opinion: sustainability content should be added to GCSEs

Here's how it could work.

Rayn Lakha

In 2023, I entered the Homerton sustainability essay competition, answering the prompt “Evaluate a measure that could be implemented in your community to make it more sustainable and/or healthy. Describe any ideas you have and how you would test and implement them in your community” with a proposal for adding sustainability content to GCSEs. The essay won the ‘best essay’ prize for its category.

Since then, this proposal has been raised in parliament, and I’ve run a pre-GCSE pilot version of the initiative in my school.

Here, the original essay is edited and reformatted to be presented as an opinion article.

Tackling climate change necessitates individual action; individual action requires knowledge. Education, then, could be a potent tool in increasing England’s sustainability. Unfortunately, sustainability-related content is sparse in England’s curriculum, existing only in siloed science and geography syllabi, the latter of which is quickly dropped by most students. The multidisciplinary nature, complexity, and immense importance of sustainability render this approach inadequate: the British Science Association found that school provides students with insufficient knowledge to improve their personal sustainability, and  40% of employers believe that the current education system fails to equip young people with a sufficient understanding of sustainability to contribute to the crucial green economy as adults. Hence, most teachers and pupils want more climate education in schools, across multiple disciplines.

There are four key restraining factors in any educational initiative: timing, financial restrictions, students’ age, and teachers’ subject knowledge. Ideally, climate education would occur at all ages, but targeting GCSEs may be wise for an initial programme: students are old enough to learn about climate issues in a nuanced manner, but have not yet specialised intensively, so a multidisciplinary approach is feasible. A programme including significant financial burdens would disadvantage students in poorer areas who may already have less climate education due to fewer accessible sustainability-related activities - for instance, 52% of students from low socio-economic backgrounds have access to science competitions at school, compared to 65% of their wealthier peers. The programme should use pre-existing apparatus as far as possible, and make academic materials freely available online. Providing free teaching resources could combat insufficient teacher knowledge: 75% of teachers feel they have received inadequate training to teach about sustainability, and they must be comfortable with the course content to teach it effectively. Timing is more complex. UK schools focus heavily on only teaching material explicitly on curricula to prepare pupils for examinations. There would likely be little uptake of an off-syllabus climate education course, so sustainability content should be added to GCSE curricula. However, teachers and students are already struggling with the large volume of GCSE content, so extra material cannot merely be attached to syllabi. There is no simple solution, but inspiration can be taken from MIT’s proposed Climate Action Through Education programme, which integrates climate content into existing curricula. For example, graphs of annual carbon emissions could be analysed in maths lessons, and chemistry lessons could link CO2-producing reactions to their utilisation in industry. Using climate change as a context in this way is effective, but not always possible. Where it does not compromise core subject-learning, optional sustainability modules should be provided as alternatives to certain sections. For example, novels relating to human experiences of climate change could be studied instead of existing contemporary literature options in English Literature. To maximise this initiative’s impact, the most commonly-taken GCSEs should be modified.

An educational programme could increase England’s sustainability in two manners: ESD1 and ESD2. ESD1 education encourages sustainable personal behavioural changes by making their necessity and feasibility clear. For example, ESD1 teaching could describe the issues of landfill waste and promote recycling, leading students to recycle more often. Children could also be encouraged to pass this information onto family members, potentially increasing their sustainability too. ESD1 could be deployed in GCSEs like biology where the exams’ focus is almost solely on information memorisation, and questions have singular correct answers. ESD2 education promotes critical thinking about sustainability, equipping students with the capability to address unforeseen climate challenges when they enter the workforce. ESD2 is crucial to fill the burgeoning green skills gap: the consulting firm PWC estimates that the UK is on track to produce a shortfall of 200,000 workers in green industries by 2050, and around 88% of surveyed UK local governmental bodies believe that such a gap would significantly or moderately inhibit climate goals. 57% of pupils already have the desire to work in green jobs; schools must provide them with the skills and problem-solving abilities to do so. ESD2 could be implemented in creative GCSEs with exams where questions do not have specified correct answers, such as history. The syllabi could be developed in conversation with pupils, teachers, and sustainability experts from industry and academia so that they focus on real issues which pupils enjoy studying and dedicate attention to.

Merely imparting general information does not drive action. Sustainability education to drive personal behavioural change cannot rely solely on the provision of climate knowledge. Instead, personal relevance to the issue and perceived impact are more important. Our educational initiative should centre on relevant, feasible solutions. For example, based on provided mathematical datasets (like that provided by OCR for mathematics A Level), students could calculate how much carbon dioxide they would save by cycling instead of driving to school, and in biology they could learn about the corresponding public health impact. This approach could have a marked impact on England’s sustainability: a similar year-long university course led the average student to reduce their carbon footprint by 2.86 tons per year for over 5 years through individual actions such as reducing waste. Although differences in attitude between university and GCSE students could result in a different outcome, both age groups care deeply about aiding the environment, so a similar effect seems likely. This could be tested in a pilot programme by utilising the 2-MEV model (a questionnaire to determine students’ environmental values which was recently validated in a study of over 10,000 children); any behavioural changes and their lifespan could be measured. 

Pupils’ personal behavioural changes could also have knock-on effects in their community, enlarging any positive environmental impact. A survey of 2000 US adults found that second-order normative beliefs (beliefs about the attitudes of community members) predicted individuals’ energy saving actions while personal beliefs did not. Adults may be influenced by the attitudes of students in their community, and become more environmentally-conscious as a result. However, adults may not view schoolchildren as impactful peers, so may not hold their actions in high enough regard to change their own behaviour. Conversely, possibly due to parents’ emotional closeness to their children, children’s views strongly influence their parents’ attitudes: climate-sceptic male or conservative parents in North Carolina more than doubled their concern about climate change when their children studied it at school over two years. Even if children do not directly affect unrelated adults, they are immensely effective at persuading their parents, who in turn may influence other adults. In this way, effective GCSE climate education could spread sustainable behaviours throughout a community. This could also be tested with the 2-MEV model.

Learning core climate knowledge at a young age complements the development of specialised sustainability skills as an adult, enabling more individuals to work effectively in green jobs. It would be difficult to actually measure how effective our proposed programme would be at closing the green skills gap, given the long timespan and many uncontrolled factors in a person’s career between studying for their GCSEs and entering specialised green jobs, but at least short-term accumulation of relevant knowledge could be determined by observing students’ exam results.

The educational programme’s ethics must also be considered. Some argue that exposing children to a threat as dangerous as climate change could harm their mental health. However, 70% of UK children already suffer from climate anxiety despite little coverage in school - trying to keep sustainability knowledge from students is clearly not the solution. In fact, some remark that since anxiety is fundamentally uncertainty about a future threat, reducing the uncertainty surrounding global warming by teaching it in school could reduce students’ climate anxiety. However, this approach accentuates the magnitude of the climate threat and so instils feelings of powerlessness, actually enhancing students’ anxiety instead. Evidence-based behavioural models, particularly social cognitive theory, suggest that perceptions of risk and self-efficacy influence anxiety. It is infeasible to rapidly reduce the climate risk faced by an individual, so instead a climate educational programme should enhance students’ perceived agency, reducing their feelings of helplessness by encouraging relevant collective action that has a positive impact on their local community - for example, energy conservation advocacy. The accompanying social-emotional bonding with peers working towards a common green goal may also support students’ mental health: a study of 300 university students found that climate anxiety only leads to depression in the absence of group activities. 

To defend young people and enable them to defend their future against the ravages of climate change - tangible and intangible - schools must empower students to take effective, collaborative, and relevant action for their community. The consequences of climate change are too significant and too uncertain to leave those who will face them with insufficient knowledge, inadequate critical thinking skills, and an unwillingness to act due to feelings of helplessness.