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Hello again,
Thank you so much for your continued support for our Teach the Future campaign. We are making real progress and have some exciting updates we'd like to share with you...
Many of us are back to school, college and university for the year, yet there is still no commitment from the government to amend the national curriculum to integrate topics of climate emergency and ecological crisis.
We cannot wait, so we have created our 'curriculum for a changing climate' to demonstrate where and how climate education can be implemented within the existing guidelines of the English national curriculum. A group of academics used a 'tracked changes' methodology to show the amendments for a range of KS3 and KS4 (GCSE) subjects. Teachers are already using this guidance to change how they engage with the climate crisis in the classroom so that young people feel empowered by the solutions, rather than feeling hopeless and scared.
We now want to provide guidelines for all primary subjects so that more students, across all levels of education, receive better climate education and teachers are supported to teach it.
The money raised will help to pay the academics, with subjects specialities, to complete the primary subject reviews. Please share our crowdfunder on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
If all our supporters donate £2 (or more) we will quickly reach our target.
Over the past few months, Teach the Future England have been meeting with lots of MPs and Peers in parliament to discuss our new policy asks and how we can ensure our next government implements them.
We contacted and asked to meet with 126 politicians from across all major parties. We’ve met with Ed Miliband and Kerry McCarthy from the Labour Climate Change and Net Zero team, and Bridget Philipson and Stephen Morgan from the Education team. We’ve also met with Lord Newby, Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, and Lord Teverson, Liberal Democrats Lords Spokesperson (energy and climate change). All of these politicians stated support for our asks so we hope to see these included in manifestos.
We were also happy to receive a written response from Gillian Keegan, Secretary of State for Education, in July 2023 which we have published in our blog.
Read our blog about our meetings with politicians
Our Wales team had the opportunity to present our updated campaign asks to MSs, students, teachers, academics, and representatives from youth, environment, and educational organisations, at the historic Pierhead in Cardiff Bay. Read all about the event in our blog.
We are harnessing the opportunity of the next general election by mobilising more young people to meet with parliamentary candidates to secure ambitious and meaningful commitments on climate education. In our meetings with local parliamentary candidates, we will ask a set of climate education themed questions from our parliamentary candidate report card: a mock of the teacher-student report cards. Our report cards will reveal which candidates will commit to climate education and to what extent by giving them a score of 9-1, based on the current GCSE grading scheme. The scores will be revealed on our website so watch this space and to see which candidates make it to our gold star chart!
We will continue to demonstrate how young people can have a political impact, and to help build our collective voice we will ask our parents, carers and teachers to amplify our asks.
72% of young people would like to learn about climate change in their schools(1) but 70% of teachers don't feel adequately trained to teach on the subject(2). Teach the Teacher wants to change that!
Teach the Teacher is a student-led climate education campaign that aims to empower young people to deliver a workshop on climate change directly to their teachers. Our campaign provides students with free online training, resources and support; giving them the confidence and opportunity to engage their teachers in an open conversation around climate change and the need for climate education.
We would love the opportunity to bring Teach the Teacher to any interested students and their schools. If you or someone you know is interested in running a session you can find out more about the campaign on our website or by watching our What is Teach the Teacher? short video, or speak to us at hello@teachtheteacher.uk.
View and share our Teach the Teacher poster too.
We joined the Mock Education Ministers Summit (Mock EMS), organised by our sister campaign, Mock COP. The youth statement on quality climate education was published as a key outcome of the Summit. The statement represents the first ever youth definition of quality climate education, and a resulting set of clear asks. It is the work of 227 national youth delegates from 89 countries coming together to raise ambition for climate education over 2 days of learning, discussions and negotiations.
Teach the Future volunteer, Phoebe Hanson facilitated the panel discussion, 'Youth action on climate education' and shared what we have been doing in our campaign. You can watch back the discussion via Mock COP's YouTube.
We are currently working with Teaching Times, an online platform of CPD Professional Learning for Teachers and Education, to create a course on embedding climate education, based on our tracked changes project. We will work with our team of academics who have created the project, and teachers on the ground using the resources, to create an engaging, useful and inspiring course which schools can sign-up to to help them embed climate into their teaching and learning.
We desperately want to make the most of our hard-won commitments so far and support more students to take the lead, set precedent and raise ambition.
Kind Regards,
Alyson (24), Charlie (15), Yasmine (24), Ellen (17) and all at TTF