VIDEO: One Giant Leap? Presentation to the Council for Subject Associations - July 2024

I was invited by UCL’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education to present at an event on July 16th at the Natural History Museum. I couldn’t make it in person to the NHM, so sent a pre-recorded presentation. The event was a few days before the official announcement by the Department for Education that there would be an independent review of Curriculum and Assessment.

I has been asked to explore (through the lens of the climate and nature crisis) the systemic level changes that might be needed, or might be coming, in England in regard to the National Curriculum. I was making the case for a ‘radical’ rather then ‘tinkering’ review to be commissioned. Something we were already calling for at Global Action Plan that summer.

See below for the video and a full transcript:

One Giant Leap? Presentation by Dr Morgan Phillips at Natural History Museum on July 16th 2024 exploring potential change to the National Curriculum in England ahead of a much anticipated independent review of Curriculum and Assessment arrangements.

Full transcript of speech:

Hello, I’m Morgan Phillips[i], Director of Education and Youth Engagement at Global Action Plan. I’m sorry I’m not there in person today, I’ve got a governor meeting back here in Wales that I can’t miss.

Firstly then, Global Action Plan, we’re an environmental charity with three focus areas, clean air, the online climate, and what we call ‘generation action’[ii].

Across these three movement areas we mobilise action on the systems that harm us and our planet.

For the generation action movement, this means mobilising action on our education systems, specifically at the moment, the English education system.

Our goal is an education system that prepares young people to take collective action for the good of people and planet.

A few weeks ago, Alison very kindly invited me to present to you today on the systemic level changes that might be needed, or might be coming, in England in regard to the National Curriculum. I think the word ‘radical’ might have been mentioned; and the education systems many environmental education scholars and practitioners would design – if given a blank sheet of paper – would indeed look radically different to the education system that exists in England today.

I’ll provide you with a very brief sketch of an education system that a climate and nature literate educationalist might design (well, this climate and nature literate educationalist at least). But I’m not going to make that idealised system, that destination, the focus of this talk. I’m not that self-indulgent, and there’s plenty of literature that I can point you to to read up on that[iii],[iv],[v],[vi],[vii]

What I want to focus on is the pathway to that destination because (after years of it basically being blocked) it might now, in England, be about to open up. Or, at least, it could open up if enough of us – those of us who believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when they conclude this: “Targeting a climate resilient, sustainable world involves fundamental changes to how society functions, including changes to underlying values, worldviews, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationships.”[viii] – are prepared to beat that path open.

Climate scientists have been saying this sort of thing to each other for well over a decade, but the IPCC saying it is a significant gear change, even if it is buried in the FAQs of the sixth assessment report… it made it through the filters.

OK, so, the destination. What is the education system we need, if what we need are ‘fundamental changes to how society functions, including change to underlying values, worldviews, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationship?’

Like I say, I’m not going to indulge in this destination stuff too heavily, I’m going to whistle through it in six minutes and make three key points. The education system we are aiming for:

1. Has a pronounced societal purpose, and it is a markedly different societal purpose to the one that is implicit within the current education system.

2. Pre-figures the society it is trying to help create, it functions as a climate resilient sustainable world would function because it is laced through with values, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationships, that are different to those that dominate in today’s society.

3. Will have elements that are very recognisable to those of you who are familiar with the sorts of education that folk like Ken Robinson, Carol Dweck, Guy Claxton have advocated for – not all education for sustainability is about sustainability, most of it, in fact, isn’t.

So, two minutes on each of these.

First, societal purpose. I’ve written recently on this, a short essay on ‘an education system in need of a purpose’ it’s on LinkedIn[ix]. In its current state, the education system in England doesn't have an explicit named purpose, but implicitly - at a societal level - it is probably something like this: the reproduction of the society and economy that it is, itself, a product of.

In other words, it is there to sustain the cultures, customs, traditions, history, story of England, or Britain, and to sustain and/or grow the competitive, hyper-individualistic, hierarchical, consumer capitalist, neoliberal society and economy we live in. It is not a challenge to that society, not a strong one at least.

Because the societal purpose is to sustain the status quo, it is easy to forget that there even is a societal purpose, it kind of hovers unnoticed in the background.

As a result, the purpose of education seems today to be nothing more than to prepare young people to survive and thrive – as individuals – in a neoliberal world. Given where neoliberalism is seemingly taking us, this is not a purpose environmental educators (in the main) can get behind.

And given that what’s needed is ‘fundamental change to how society functions’ we, it could be argued – as a society – need to use all the tools at our disposal, which includes the education system. Therefore, we need an education system that has contributing to fundamental societal change, as it’s societal purpose. Education can’t fix the climate and ecological crisis, but it has a key role to play if we truly want a ‘climate resilient, sustainable world’.

Quick footnote before I go onto point 2… while societal purpose is more pronounced, environmental educators are still emphatically concerned with that other purpose of, for example, a school – teachers are striving to ensure that every single child leaves schools ready to survive in, thrive in, and contribute to the society they will enter into. This is as true of an education system that exists in a wider context of a society that is going through a change process, as it is of an education system that exists in a wider context of a society that is more stable.

Right, point two: pre-figuring the society it is helping to create. Here’s a definition of pre-figurative politics: “The term prefigurative politics refers to a political orientation based on the premise that the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or ‘prefigure’ the kind of society they want to bring about.” (Darcy Leach, 2022)[x].

What does this mean in terms of the education system we’re aiming for? It means running education settings in ways that align with the ways we want society to run, i.e. on renewable energy, in harmony with nature, resilient to climate change, but also equitably, justly, democratically, collaboratively, in other words laced through with these sorts of compassionate values [Universalism, Benevolence, Self-Direction], rather than these sorts of self-interest values [Conformity, Tradition, Security, Power] (Common Cause values map [xi]).

If these more compassionate values were stronger in our schools, then we might expect control over the education system would be a lot less centralised than it is in today’s education system where self-interest values are promoted. A pivot to compassionate values would likely mean greater autonomy for communities, schools, teachers, and young people – who would have a much greater say in what they learn and how they learn it. Schools would also become more creative, collaborative, entrepreneurial, spaces.

Finally, point 3: Environmental educators aren’t as obsessed with cramming more climate and nature content into the National Curriculum as you might think. Sure, it would be nice for there to be more of it. Understanding the scale of the Earth crisis, but also the beauty and wonder of nature, is very very important, but what’s equally important is the development of the sort of competencies and dispositions Stephen Sterling[xii] lists here:

• reflexive,

• experiential,

• inquiring,

• experimental,

• participative,

• iterative,

• real-world, and

• action-oriented.

Which would help a learner to develop the sorts of competencies and dispositions Sir Ken Robinson [xiii] listed here…

• Curiosity

• Creativity

• Criticism

• Communication

• Collaboration

• Compassion

• Composure

• Citizenship.

All of which implies a quite radical departure from the sorts of pedagogy, curriculum, and culture that dominates in today’s school system (at Secondary level especially).

So, to summarise, the education system we’d like to see would have a pronounced societal purpose built around supporting a society-wide effort to change the way the world functions. It would pre-figure that world by running in ways that mean it is the change we want to see. And it would prioritise knowledge about sustainability issues along with the learner dispositions that are at the more progressive end of the trad-prog spectrum.

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So, how do we get there, or somewhere like there? In 1987, an academic called Bob Stevenson wrote one of the landmark environmental education papers[xiv]. He was highlighting the rhetoric-reality gap that exists in our sector. When we talk about what climate, or sustainability, or environmental education and what it should be, we talk about the things I’ve just been talking about. We cite scholars like Stephen Sterling, but also practitioners like Rachel Musson [xv], and institutions like Black Mountains College [xvi], or the New School for the Anthropocene [xvii] – i.e. exciting, innovative stuff that is happening, but only in tiny little pockets.

The truth is, the gap between our rhetoric about what good environmental education is, and the reality of the environmental education the vast majority of students in England receive, is still massive. 37 years on from publication of his original paper, the rhetoric-reality gap – Stevenson’s gap – is still a very very wide one. Within the confines of the English education system it is, not impossible, but very hard, to deliver a meaningful version of sustainability education. I.e. a version that focuses on more than just scientific knowledge. It is not easy to deliver education that develops sustainability skills, dispositions, habits of mind, and compassionate values. When one observes the English education system one doesn’t see (or rarely sees) sustainability education that pre-figures the education system we want to see.

What we see are very diluted versions of environmental education that fit the Direct Instruction Knowledge Rich paradigm that has come to dominate in England’s schools. These versions largely ineffective because (a) they don’t tend to engage students on an emotional level – they don’t have any sort of transformative impact on their values and dispositions – and (b) they are dwarfed by – and I’ll put this in inverted commas – ‘more important’ topics. The volume of environmental education a typical student receives is miniscule, the number of hours of it they get in a year is tiny – they may as well be getting nothing, look at these survey results from a Royal Meteorological Society commissioned survey.

Now, as I’ve said earlier, quality environmental education is not just about knowledge, the development of skills, dispositions, worldviews and values are vital components too and every environmental educator should be conscious of what skills, dispositions, worldviews and values they are nurturing in young people. It differs wildly from school to school in England, but when you look at something like the Common Cause values map and then observe what is going on in any particular school, you can see that some schools, and some teachers, and some environmental education programmes for that matter, activate and reinforce values in the bottom half of the map, while others are activating and reinforcing the opposite values, in the top half of the map. And this stuff really, really matters, because we know that when people hold these sorts of values (and perceive others to hold them too [xviii]), they are far more likely to want to act for the good of people and planet, and actually act for the good of people and planet.

So, what I’m saying here is that not only is our school system largely failing to educate young people about sustainability issues, it is – in some cases, not all – activating and reinforcing values that work against the creation of a climate resilient, sustainable society. The education system is not a benign force. It is not nurturing very many young people who are prepared (both willing and able) to take collective action for the good of people and planet. On the contrary, it is – at best – nurturing young people who have the resilience and ability to adapt to a world that they receive (a quite passive position to be in), and – at worst – it nurtures young people who go on to create – through their careers, their lifestyles, their consumer decisions – an even more unstable and unsustainable society.

How are we going to bridge this gap, Stevenson’s gap? How are we going to get from one side of the river, to the other side of the river? On today’s side of the river, we have the current education system, it is resistant to sustainability education, hostile even, it is, it could be argued, actively running counter to our prospects of creating a climate resilient, sustainable society. On the other side of the river, is the education system of our dreams, it has the creation of a climate resilient, sustainable society as a core societal purpose.

Getting from one side to the other is the challenge, I would not suggest we do this in one leap – it is just too far. The differences between the education system we have now, and the education system we need, are too big. The governance structures would be different, the curriculum structures would be different, as would everything else, from pedagogy, assessment, and accountability, to infrastructure, facilities, and, of course, the overarching purposes for society and for individuals.

We need a stepping stone.

Now, this is where things get practical, because with the arrival of a new government, we have entered a period of change. And if we care about the creation of a climate resilient, sustainable world, we have to seize this moment, because it is a moment of opportunity. It is a chance to create a stepping stone – and that is how we have to think about the reformed version of the education system that the Government could now build. It is not the destination, it is a stepping stone on the path to the education system we need.

In July 2023, Keir Starmer said this – ‘the next Labour Government will review the National Curriculum’[xix]

Bridget Phillipson has repeated this in several speeches since, and most recently in a podcast interview[xx].

The Labour Party, when in opposition, wrote a page about their planned curriculum and assessment review in this document (Breaking down barriers to opportunity [xxi]).

It is, I think, safe to assume that there will be an expert-led review, and it will happen soon (it may in fact have been commissioned in the time between me recording this speech and you listening to it).

When Governments commission reviews, what they’re really commissioning is a set of recommendations and they tend to select experts who, while independent, are likely to furnish them with a set of recommendations that are agreeable to them. Call me cynical, but – based simply on the sorts of things Phillipson has been saying over the last two years - it is already possible to predict with some accuracy what the conclusions of the review will be and what the recommendations it will make will cover. Once the expert has been selected and the terms of reference published, it’ll be even easier to predict the outcomes of review. It is not, however, a done deal. As campaigners and advocates for change there are things we can do to influence the thinking of both the expert and the Secretary of State before and during the review.

In 2014, when the Welsh Government commissioned an independent review of curriculum and assessment in Wales, it called on Professor Graham Donaldson. The terms of reference [xxii] they gave him didn’t give much away, but were revealing. What was more revealing was Donaldson’s admission in an interview [xxiii], last year, when he said this…

The pressures on the core were building and they were trying to reconcile increasing pressures with a tightly defined national curriculum so I agreed to undertake a radical review, it wasn’t a kind of tinkering review. The agreement with Ministers was that it would be as radical as it needed to be based on what I found.

The Donaldson review – Successful Futures [xxiv] – made 67 recommendations, they were accepted in full by the Welsh Government, it is the foundation upon which the new Curriculum for Wales is built. I won’t go into the full details of the Curriculum for Wales, but it is the kind of stepping stone I’m talking about. If successful, and it is only just being fully rolled out now, has the potential to take the Welsh education system quite far across the stream.

The question is will Phillipson commission a ‘tinkering’ review, or a ‘radical’ review? This is one to watch, the terms of reference given to the expert are going to be worth keeping an eye on. A tinkering review won’t give us the stepping stone we need, but a radical review just might – that’s what Global Action Plan is calling for. We wrote to Phillipson last week to ask her precisely this [xxv].

Another thing worth keeping an eye on is the composition of any expert panel, or advisory group invited to contribute to the review and the formulation of its recommendations. This group needs to be diverse, it needs to include people with many different SEND specialisms, it needs pedagogical and assessment experts, it needs teachers, young people, governors, subject specialists, but it also needs at least one person with expert knowledge of the climate and nature crisis, and someone who is a specialist in environmental education. The Earth crisis rarely features in conversations about the future of education, it is crucial that it does this time around.

Finally, a call for evidence will likely be issued. This is where we all need to step up. I have a little bit of data on this from previous reviews. The call for evidence issued by Donaldson when he did his review in Wales in 2014 received 700 responses[xxvi], that was just 0.02% of the population of Wales at the time. In 2011, when Michael Gove commissioned Tim Oates and others to review the national curriculum, 5,763 people responded to their call for evidence[xxvii], which was 0.01% of the English population at the time. I suspect the response will be greater this time around, but it needs to be much, much greater. Global Action Plan will be mobilising around this, nature’s voice, the voice of today’s young people, the voices of those impacted already by climate and ecological breakdown, and the voices of future generations, need to be heard loud and clear by the Department for Education.

To end, I want to return to Graham Donaldson’s reflections on the review he carried out and where Wales is now. Reflecting on the recommendations, Donaldson highlighted the following:

about half of the recommendations related to curriculum and assessment, and the other half related to professional learning, to leadership, to accountability, in other words if you're going to change the curriculum, you have to set the context for that in terms of the implications, for all of those other things, that ecosystem that is the education system.

Donaldson went on to explain what this means in practice. It means the Welsh Government needs to be prepared to invest in not just curriculum and assessment reform, it needs to invest in teacher education, and it needs to look at the relationship between accountability and what actually happens in schools.

Fears abound in Wales that teacher education is not being invested in[xxviii]. The fear is that without this investment, the Curriculum for Wales will struggle to take off.

This is why the terms of reference the Labour Party set out when they commission their promised expert-led review of curriculum and assessment are so crucial. Do they want a 'tinkering review' or a 'radical review'? The safe option is a ‘tinkering review’ and a set of recommendations that match the proposals Labour have already stated they intend to make.

A ‘tinkering review’ and a gentle set of recommendations would leave the wider context largely unexamined and unchallenged. Most notably, it wouldn’t require a review of the academies system, or large-scale investment in teacher education. Teachers would be required to re-think how they teach and what they teach, but – critically – not in a deep or paradigm shifting way. Crucially they wouldn’t need to examine the bigger question of why they teach, aka what the purpose of education is. A tinkering review would only get us a small way across the river – which is nowhere near far enough.

To create the stepping stone that’s needed, we need a radical review and a radical set of recommendations. I’m not saying radical in the sense that it gets us from where we are now to where we need to be (that’s too big a leap). Radical in the sense that it gets us to the stepping stone.

Now, some in the environmental movement won’t like me saying this, they’ll say the situation is too urgent, we need to get to the other side straight away.

My argument is that if we attempted such a giant leap now, we wouldn’t make it.

The changes to assessment, accountability, and governance structures, and the sheer hours of professional development of school staff that is required to get us to the stepping stone are sizeable enough, they present a significant challenge and will need significant levels of investment. But they are within the realms of possibility. And once that step has been taken, the next step, to where we need to be, becomes possible – and yes that might be 5 or 6 years away, possibly 10, but if we attempt the giant leap and end up falling way short, the reforms will be written off as a failed experiment and the education system will retreat once again, back to basics, back to where we are now – making the prospects of us ever getting to where we need to be even more remote.

The review Phillipson commissions needs to be a ‘radical’ one, not a ‘tinkering’ one. It needs to be the foundation upon which a really solid stepping stone is created. That way, when the Government of the day, whoever that is, finally accepts this [IPCC statement], when they accept that the purpose of the education system needs to speak to this ‘fundamental change’ agenda, it will have an education system in place that is already this far across the river, which will make the journey to the education system we truly need a step, not a leap.

This is why we’re writing to the Government now, to stress to them how important it is that they commission a radical, not tinkering review. We’re asking them to ensure that experts in climate and environmental science, and sustainability education are invited onto whatever expert panels or advisory groups they are convening. And we’re planning to respond, with gusto, to the call for evidence.

That is how we can build the stepping stone that we need, and that stepping stone has to be our goal right now, it would represent a radical departure from what we have right now, but not so radical that it is beyond the realms of possibility.

And once in place, it will position us to take the next step, to the education system we truly need, once the powers that be recognise the need to shift the societal purpose of education.

Thank you.

[i] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmorganhphillips/ X: www.x.com/morganhphillips

[ii] Generation Action at Global Action Plan: https://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/generation-action

[iii] For links to Stephen Sterling’s work: https://sustainableeducation.co.uk/

[iv] The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy [PDF download]: https://sustainability.glos.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Handbk-Sustainability-literacy-EC-16092020.pdf

[v] Earthwards by Katherine Burke (forthcoming): https://www.hawthornpress.com/books/changemaking/social-ecology-change/earthwards/

[vi] Peter Sutoris: https://www.petersutoris.com/educating-for-the-anthropocene

[vii] David Orr – Earth in Mind: https://islandpress.org/books/earth-mind#desc

[viii] IPCC: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/about/frequently-asked-questions/keyfaq6/

[ix] An education system in need of a purpose: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/education-system-need-purpose-dr-morgan-phillips-mbvfe/

[x] Darcy Leach on pre-figurative politics: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470674871.wbespm167.pub2

[xi] Common Cause Foundation, Values Map: https://commoncausefoundation.org/_resources/the-values-map/