To accompany our consultation with children on Learning for Sustainability provision across Scotland this year, we were invited to return to our partner settings to speak to adult educators on their experiences of delivering the curriculum. You can read our full children’s report here and report gathering the adult interviews together here.
Sophia Georgescu, Project Worker, reflects on the process of this work.
I was grateful for the opportunity to engage with adults who were so passionate about the future of children’s education in Scotland. These interviews provoked my thinking on what “structural and cultural change” can look like from an educator’s perspective, from practitioners implementing this on the ground. Reflecting on my time in the interview process, I look forward to seeing a new Learning for Sustainability curriculum refresh that focusses on supporting adult educators to match children’s passion for climate action, positive wellbeing, and justice for children’s human rights around the world.
“I didn’t know that children shouldn’t be taught about responsibility and that they just have rights. This is hard when we think about climate action.” – Supporting teacher, Perth and Kinross.
I was interested to hear from educators that they didn’t feel confident combining Learning for Sustainability with children’s human rights practice, even when they had engaged with parts of the curriculum guidance. This was especially stark in the subject of climate change and climate action, where they shared that they felt that rights and responsibilities could be conflated when teaching children what they can do to take climate action.
Under the UNCRC, children have the right to grow up in a safe, happy, and healthy environment. They also have the right to play and learn outside, and a right to an education on their physical environment. There is a crucial distinction to draw out here, between supporting children to be involved in hope-building and positive climate action and placing messaging around children’s futures on them to “solve” the issue. We heard from the MCPs how important outdoor learning is to their wellbeing, and as such this should be preserved for them by adults as a protected space, not conflated with stewardship and responsibility.
“I love going on walks outside in nature because I feel myself and I can calm down.” – MCP, age 12, Inverclyde
“I like to play in the bluebell woods and on the swings. This makes me feel happy.” – MCP, age 8, Perthshire
Adult decision makers have the responsibility to act now to provide children with a fair, healthy and safe environment they can freely access. Promoting children as the necessary young activists and placing responsibility on them to take climate action runs the risk of distracting from the core issues that led us to the conditions we are experiencing, away from culture change, and may introduce feelings of powerlessness and climate anxiety in children. They presently cannot use voting rights to express their agency and have the right to time to play and develop, including in the outdoors.
We know that we should go to children themselves to ask how they want to be involved in issues they care so deeply about. Under the UNCRC, it is their right to have a say in the decisions that affect their lives and what they learn. Our Members of Children’s Parliament (MCPs) shared with us that they wanted to see more time and resources for all schools in Scotland to participate in global days of climate action, including Earth Days, protests and times where pollution and traffic would be halted around school. This is an example of where children can have stewardship over the planet, fostered in gathering with other children and like-minded people to express what they feel is important to them. The MCPs also highlighted the importance of eco-skills education, such as food growing, and opportunities to influence decisions in schools such as pupil voice groups. I found in the adult interviews that educators clearly want to listen to children on their desires for learning and opportunities, but that they needed more time and finances to do so within settings.
I was also drawn to the question of how children understand Learning for Sustainability to be interesting in the Early Years. One of the Early Years practitioners I spoke to highlighted that “relationship building and emotional development have to be prioritized in the younger years before they can build concepts of citizenship outsides their everyday experiences.”
This made me think of how curriculum guidance needs to draw on all the articles of the UNCRC to really embed changes and tackle them from the core. For implementation that will keep children across locations and backgrounds happy, healthy and safe, we need to listen to what they tell us works for them. The Early Years children we engaged with were so excited by their outdoor environment, picking up on seasonal changes and articulating how they felt about their friendships and time learning outside. We were delighted to hear from an MCP, age 3, at a Forest Nursery in Perthshire that “if we didn’t learn about nature, we wouldn’t know many things at all!”
So, Learning for Sustainability spans a range of subjects across how children experience our physical environment, community, and learning. There were so many different exciting perspectives across the adults I interviewed. Across these, the commitment and passion educators across Scotland have for meeting children’s emotional development needs and right of access to a physical environment, including tackling the climate emergency, really stood out to me. This can be facilitated through rights-based practice and UNCRC incorporation, as well as practice sharing between passionate practitioners. This passion needs to be met urgently with extra time and financing provided to educators. As we feel the squeeze from the cost of living crisis this year, children and children’s educational spaces will also feel the loss of the material support they need to engage in key activities for wellbeing and learning that is less well embedded into mainstream delivery.
I want to round off by sharing a key concept at the heart of rights-based practice that we have been reflecting on here at Children’s Parliament. Where rights are fulfilled, including on individual levels, human dignity is present. As an MCP recently told me, “when we come together and no one is alone then we have human dignity.” As we look back a year on from COP26 in Glasgow and we see the full power of children’s participation in decisions around education such as this, we need to bring all our decision making together to meet human dignity so no one feels the weight of change-making alone. Curriculum delivery planning can involve children and ensure that their education meets their needs, but it can also be a part of a wider culture shift of those with decision making power taking responsibility to change the way we live to keep children happy, healthy and safe. This pertains to climate change, an issue our MCPs kept returning to, but it fits across the Learning for Sustainability curriculum in access to quality outdoor learning spaces, global connection opportunities, and provision of education on sustainable development and social justice. To repeat a well-worn phrase: the time is now to act.
“Adults need to stop talking about climate change and actually do something” – MCP, age 12, Inverclyde
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Thank you to the educators who shared their time and perspectives with me through our interview process, and thank you to Scottish Government for supporting our consultation.
We look forward to seeing the new Learning for Sustainability Action Plan and promoting the power of children’s human rights.