As the UN Climate Change Conference, COP30 continues in Brazil, as politicians, scientists and world leaders from across the world meet to discuss climate change, to argue, to negotiate and to work out a route forwards to reduce the human impact on our climate and nature, we remain committed to preparing children, young people and educators in Scotland to take positive action on climate change.
In this blog our Education and Learning Manager, Andrea Gabriel, highlights our unique approach to delivering climate education at scale, empowering almost 18,000 children and young people to date to make choices that positively support nature and our environment, and help alleviate climate anxiety.
My experience here in Scotland, and back home in Chile where I grew up, is that climate change is already having massive impacts – the deadly wildfires around in the city of Valparaiso, to name only one, in early 2024, and the increasing number and scale of extensive wildfires in Scotland this summer (despite me thinking that this is a wet country) show us some of the challenges a changing climate is presenting us with now.
I have heard first-hand about the issues young people and educators care about and need more information on – climate change is one of them. This is why it is so vitally important to me that we are able to positively support educators, children and young people to understand more about climate change and what they can do.
Climate Action Schools is the framework we use to support progressing the range of opportunities that Target 2030 and the vision for Sustainable Settings and a Whole-School Approach to Learning for Sustainability present us. It encompasses all our education initiatives – from our online Live Lesson series to the world-leading Eco-Schools programme which we have delivered, in partnership with the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE), for more than three decades.
It also includes Climate Ready Classrooms - on of our responses to the need identified by educators, children and young people to understand more about climate change and learn more about what they can do. It also forms one of our responses to supporting the Public Engagement Strategy for Climate Change, in particular reaching children and young people.
Alarmingly, research shows that up to three-quarters of UK teachers don’t feel equipped to tackle this issue in the classroom[1].
And in the most recent YoungScot Truth About Youth survey climate change was the second top issue in the news (58%) that was of concern to young people, and the second top thing that they thought about for their own future.
We offer Climate Ready Classrooms for high schools and also for primary schools.
The high school course is a one-day accredited Carbon Literacy training course accredited by the Carbon Literacy Project, for which we are the official partner in Scotland.
But it is our offer developed for primary schools which is really changing the narrative of climate education in Scotland.
But let’s step back – where did our climate ready classrooms programme come from and what is it achieving today?
In 2018/2019 we built on our knowledge delivering Carbon Literacy training in communities and developed a fun, hands-on one-day Climate Ready Classrooms workshop to capture the imagination of secondary school pupils and channel the passion they showed through climate strikes made famous by Greta Thunberg. With funding from the Scottish Government, we were able to pilot the workshops, along with teacher training, seeking input from Young Scot and members of the 2050 Climate Group.
Climate Ready Classrooms was piloted with 13 schools in nine local authority areas and by March 2019 it had been tested by over 200 young people and 18 education practitioners, with 100% of participants confirming that the workshop had significantly improved their understanding of climate change and low carbon actions and increased their confidence to spread the word at school and in their community.
Add a health pandemic and a complete shift in our approach to living, working, and educating in 2020, to the biggest global climate change conference coming to Glasgow in 2021 and the opportunity arose for us to quickly respond to the need for online and in person teaching to meet the appetite from teachers and pupils for more climate information.
But something was missing. We started to hear from primary school teachers. They wanted to know how they could access climate change education support. They wanted to feel confident with lesson plans and to understand how they could engage the whole school, reduce their carbon footprint, develop STEM skills and provide evidence for their Eco-Schools Green Flag Award.
So, we developed resources and a workshop model which we piloted with three local authorities in 2023 – the feedback was amazing and led us to role out Climate Ready Classrooms for primary schools as it is today, with funding from the Scottish Government in 2023/2024.
Since May 2023 we have taught 17,390 primary school pupils in 16 local authority areas.
Climate Ready Classrooms for primary is a national programme, being delivered on a local authority level creating hyper local school action plans.
Our delivery team are working with Scotland’s Development Education Centres to provide support to teachers ahead of sessions with pupils, giving them access to support with tasks that are set and resources that help them after the sessions.
Some local authorities are embedding Climate Ready Classrooms across all primary schools, building it into an annual activity. And the great thing is that by working at a local authority level, rather than school by school, we are able to ensure that educators and pupils feel like they are part of a community taking action and can hear ideas and experiences of others from outwith their school but within the same region. Participants can hear about actions the local authority is taking – the plan it has to tackle climate change and the positive contributions they can make.
Inverclyde Council took a whole local authority approach inviting all primary schools to register P5-P7 pupils to take part in a cross region learning opportunity. By running three online workshops over a single day, referencing Inverclyde’s climate change priorities, and setting actions after each workshop we were able to inspire pupils to develop their own action plans – including creating more green areas, reducing energy, planting more trees, shopping locally and supporting biodiversity in the playground.
In 2024/2025 we taught 7,600 pupils and 211 educators through our primary school Climate Ready Classrooms programme. And so far, this school year we have already reached 2,382 pupils.
When you consider we also welcomed 8,000 pupils to our Climate Change live lessons in September and we are also delivering climate change education in Gaelic, for me it becomes clear just how big an impact our small education team is having this year alone.
We know that we can scale up our impact. We have an approach that works. We know many children and young people suffer from climate anxiety, the problem seems so big, out of control – in the hands of those discussing it at COP30 in the Brazilian jungle. But, through Climate Ready Classrooms we have found that we have a chance to be honest about the risks of climate change while inspiring pupils and practitioners to imagine their schools and communities as climate and nature friendly spaces, and start moving towards making it happen.
What we need now is for the Scottish Parliament to continue to show leadership and ensure that climate education in schools is embedded as a priority and that investment to support this activity is not only maintained but increased in the future.
Climate Ready Classrooms helps us support the ambitions of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG 4 and 13.
We support the 