Learning to live in sustainable manner
Many councils across the UK, including Brighton and Hove, declared a climate emergency in 2019.
Uniquely, Brighton and Hove had the commitment and vision to see that education is the key to us finding the solutions to address this emergency. They understood the need to educate ourselves out of this crisis and, as a result, they funded the development, with and by local schools, of the Our City, Our World programme.
The programme is focussed on schools:
• developing an integrated environmental, sustainability and climate change curriculum i.e. gradually and systematically ‘greening’ the curriculum, teaching key sustainability concepts and supporting the development of green skills
• developing school organisational systems and practices which support sustainability and the B&H Carbon Neutral 2030 targets for biodiversity, energy, consumption and waste, water, travel and food
• enabling children and young people to develop a close connection with nature and in particular our local biosphere
• empowering children and young people and their families to become changemakers both personally and collectively
It should be understood by all educationalists, schools and policy makers that the absence of a climate change curriculum is clearly a fundamental safeguarding issue. Young people need to fully understand how to live in a sustainable manner in order to make the right choices and thereby create a world in which it is safe to live
Backed by a comprehensive training programme and an extensive curriculum framework and resources, Our City, Our World is a substantial and creative response to the woeful inadequacies of our present curriculum and the ‘placebo policy’* designed by the DfE (Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems).
Our city, our world schools are changing their curriculum, systems and cultures, influencing family behaviours and making much stronger links with local environmental organisations. We have moved away from a few children in an eco-committee carrying out occasional projects to all members of the school taking responsibility for living in a more sustainable way, both personally and collectively. As well as planning for long term sustainable development and improvements, they are seeing their day to day actions through a green lens, challenging wasteful habits and adopting principles of a circular economy. Regular school events such as book and art weeks are given a green context, meadows are grown in schools playgrounds across the city, refill shops are run by the children, freegle events, clothes and book swaps have become regular termly events. PCTAs now plan their events based on key sustainability principles.
The urgency and size of the crisis we face calls for immediate transformational action in our schools. We are seeing this in Brighton and Hove and hope that all leaders of our schools nationally will see it as their moral duty to act, otherwise, in just a few years, we will look back and see we have been guilty of gravely failing our children.
* BERA ‘The place of education in the government’s draft sustainability and climate change strategy’ Linda Dunlop, Elizabeth Rushton Feb 2022
