Sustainability and Climate Change (National Curriculum)

Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking, in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. I remind Members that they are asked by the House to have a covid lateral flow test twice a week if coming on to the parliamentary estate. This can be done either at the testing centre in the House, or at home. Please give each other and members of staff room when seated, and when entering and leaving the room.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the inclusion of sustainability and climate change in the national curriculum.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ghani. I thank Mr Speaker for granting this debate, and I welcome the Minister to his place. I also thank colleagues for being present, including those who have long been staunch advocates on the issue of climate and ecology, and particularly the chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne).

To stop runaway climate change, we have to reduce our emissions by half every decade. The world needs to reach net zero by 2050. That requires sustained political pressure on our leaders and huge changes to every part of our economy—changes that the Climate Change Committee has described as

“unprecedented in their overall scale”.

It requires that we build an economy based on clean energy, creating secure, sustainable jobs through investment in green industry, transitioning away from sectors with high emissions, and restoring our natural world. It requires a public who are informed and knowledgeable about the climate, and a shift in emphasis when it comes to the skills that are valued and taught in our society. Does the Minister agree that teaching students knowledge and practical skills relating to climate change and green technology is a key component in transitioning to a low-carbon society?

Even if the world is on track to limit the overall rise in temperature to 1.5°—that is a big if—there will still be repercussions for us environmentally, socially and economically. The climate crisis is already here, and we must be prepared to adapt and mitigate its effects in our changing world. A child who started primary school last month will not yet have turned 35 in 2050—the year in which the Government intend to reach net zero carbon emissions—but our current education system does not acknowledge how different our society will be by then, and it will not equip that child with the tools they will need to live and work in it. As Greta Thunberg said when people questioned why she was not at school and was instead striking for the climate,

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for allowing me to intervene so early in her remarks, but she has already got to the crux of the issue. I congratulate her on securing the debate and on her role on the Environmental Audit Committee, where she has made a significant contribution, not least to the report on green jobs that we published on Monday. The recommendation in paragraph 102 of that report specifically addresses the point she makes, stating that we need to embed environmental sustainability, including it across all subjects in primary and secondary schools and, obviously, in the vocational curriculum.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention and wholeheartedly agree with his comments. I again thank him for all the work he has done as the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee in progressing not just this issue but the need for green jobs across society and in all our communities.

The UN is championing the need for climate education in the national curriculum. Also firmly on board are all the major teaching unions, but at the forefront of this campaign is the youth climate strike movement, some members of which are here today. They have made climate education a clear key demand of their campaign. I thank Scarlett, Yasmin, Charlie, Tess and Stella who have joined us from Teach the Future. They have been driving this debate forward and are of the generation—my generation—that forced our Parliament to declare a climate and ecological emergency almost two and a half years ago.

These young people are still in school, too young to vote or stand for elections, but they have led the way in driving the climate crisis up the political agenda. They have shown this House how change is won. As Parliament’s youngest MP, I feel pride in being part of their generation and a particular responsibility to represent them, but they need representation from the whole House. For decades, huge corporations have polluted our planet with impunity, and the Governments of previous generations have let them off far too lightly. That must end. My generation, young people, and those yet to be born will have to deal with and live with the consequences.

Does the Minister agree that the very least older generations can do is equip young people with the skills they need to clean up the mess that was not of their making? Will the Minister find time to meet with me and the school students here today to discuss the campaign and how we can progress it through Government?

Next week we will host world leaders at COP26. This is our last and best chance of stopping runaway climate change. I want us to show the world that we are serious, that we are listening to young people’s calls, and that we are not just inspired by them but inspired to act.

I thank the hon. Lady. I am sorry I cannot see which constituency she represents, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak in the debate.

Nottingham East.

I thank the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome). That is a great part of the world. When you live in west Cornwall, you do not travel much beyond London, unless you have to.

It is great to be able to speak in this debate, not least because schools in Cornwall are brilliant at raising awareness of climate change and the harm we do to our planet. I have received thousands of letters from schoolchildren setting out their concerns and asking pertinent questions about my commitment to this critical issue. When I was elected, I made myself a perhaps foolish promise that I would always write personally and individually to every child from whom I received a letter. I may regret that because it is a massive task, but well worth doing, because each letter contains real examples of why those children care about climate change.

I have visited many of the amazing schools across Cornwall. Mullion School introduced me to its eco-club and its technology to monitor the ice caps and what is happening in the coldest parts of our world, which are unfortunately heating up. Mounts Bay Academy’s tree-planting, polytunnel and plastic-free efforts have transformed the thinking in schools and homes. Nancledra school invited me very early on in 2016 to its eco-fair. Trythall school, where my children go, invited me to see the work it was doing with members of Women’s Institutes to make the school and their homes more environmentally friendly. Nearly all schools across my constituency have invited me to see their efforts to reduce plastic waste. We in Cornwall are fortunate to have Surfers Against Sewage, who do a great job with schools, and many schools around the country are following that example. Marazion School has actually taken me on beach cleans, which is a great joy, because the children are so much nearer to the stuff they are picking up than we are. As we get older, picking up these little plastic things becomes a challenge, so I recommend that my children go and clean up the waste we have made. I am joking. I am going to get shot in a minute.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich East—I mean for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome)—on securing this debate. Sorry, that was a Freudian slip: everywhere is Norwich to me. The hon. Gentleman is making a good speech, but does he agree that, just as we should teach our children about the climate crisis and its onset, we should do so in schools and classrooms that are not belching out carbon at the same time? Is it not critical that this Government get on top of that and decarbonise the education estate by 2030 at the latest?

I agree, and I welcome the intervention. When I was on the Environmental Audit Committee, we looked at various plans to decarbonise the public estate by 2032. That is a massive challenge and hugely expensive, but it is right that we should prioritise the places where our children learn. We know that in many places, our school estates are not fit for purpose in terms of the best learning experience, let alone the right thing for the environment. That is just one of the many significant challenges we face as we grapple with this vital issue.

Education on climate change is also about the opportunities available for the future. Cornwall offers a particular opportunity for our national and global efforts to decarbonise and switch to renewable ways of living. We have one of the world’s most important supplies of lithium. We have copper and tin-rich rock beneath our homes. In my constituency, we are led to believe, we have the third-richest tin and copper mine in the world. We have geothermal possibilities, allowing us to extract heat from the ground, and we are doing that at Jubilee Pool in Penzance. We are leaders in renewable energy and we produce some of the most sustainable food crops, dairy and meat. We have some of the most exciting potential for carbon sequestration on land and on the ocean floor, and we have the potential for a large but sustainable fishing fleet. Lack of education in schools on this presents a challenge to our ambitions.

Education should address how we shift to a greener way of living without costing the Earth. There is an interesting debate taking place in Cornwall, because as we consider extracting copper and tin once again and extracting lithium from dormant mines, and geothermal, we are trying to understand whether the immediate environmental impact of carrying out this important work is worth the result of extracting the minerals that we need in all our devices and in renewable-energy batteries, and so on. There is a real argument that we need the education and the learning in our schools, as well as among the public, about the environmental impact of digging up the ground. What exactly is it? Is it worth it? Or is it better—I say this tongue in cheek—to just get things from China or elsewhere, where we have no control over how the stuff is extracted? Education in schools could really help understanding of how we balance getting to a greener living with the impact that we have to spend right now.

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good speech. I had a debate on this in December 2017, and the response I got from the Minister was very bitty, saying “You learn a little about this in citizenship, a little bit in science, a bit in geography, and when T-levels come on board, they might have a bit.” Is the hon. Member arguing that there ought to be a GCSE in environmental science, or environmental studies, or whatever he would wish to call it? Making this a strong part of the curriculum, rather than popping up here and there and not having that overview, is the way forward.

Again, that is a great intervention. I met with the Secretary of State and eight head teachers from my constituency a couple of years ago, and we had that very discussion about how we could actually do this in schools. Interestingly, half of the heads said, “Let’s just use what we have now to get it through every part of our education and curriculum,” and the other half said “No, we need a specific resource and tool to be able to teach it,” as the hon. Lady said, potentially as a GCSE.

I am not an education expert, although I have three children going through the system at the moment. I would argue that, particularly in primary school, we should just look at every pot of learning and attach it to how we live on the planet. The connection is then how we care for the planet. We can do that in everything we teach in primary school. In secondary school, I think there should be an opportunity to continue that, but also the opportunity for students to learn and to take a particular interest.

I am trying to demonstrate that this is about the skills we need across the country to deliver what we have committed to, and that must start with preparing children and young people for the work they will do when they leave. Education in schools should address the link between our demands and the carbon in the supply chain. We often talk about wanting to take the necessary measures in our own lives to reduce our carbon footprints but we quickly find that we go and order stuff online without necessarily knowing where it comes from or the carbon footprint attached to that item. If we helped our young people to understand that better, when they look at their careers, they will look at how they can be involved in the food chain, in clothing and in all of those things that we need, but where carbon miles can be reduced.

I appreciate that you are trying to get me to shut up, Ms Ghani; I will be very quick now. We must look at what skills are needed to meet the higher skilled job opportunities in renewable energy, construction, mining, technology, agriculture and environmental and marine management. A tip from a meeting I went to this morning is that if we want our children to have great careers, we should send them down the heat engineer route. We have an opportunity, not just to enable our young people to deal with the great challenges facing them as they grow up and the challenges we should be addressing now, but to seize the opportunity, and to have the high-paid, high-skill jobs that we talk about. That means that the choices we make to do the right thing for the planet are actually choices that are good for us.

To ensure that we can incorporate all speakers, could they please be mindful of keeping their speeches to around five minutes?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ghani. It is fantastic that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) has secured the debate. Although she is a Gen Z-er and we are millennials, and our two generations disagree on many things, what unites us is our passion for the environment. Certainly, we millennials have been very inspired by Gen Z pushing forward this agenda.

In the House last week, I spoke about the Sheffield Hallam climate manifesto, which was a product of months of meetings with my constituents. We brought together campaigners, trade unionists, experts and people from across the constituency to outline measures to tackle the climate emergency and what the UK should ask for in the COP26 negotiations. In our discussions it was all too clear that, although some understood the importance and scale of the climate emergency, they were not sure about what action should be taken and felt powerless to effect the change they know we need.

That feeling of powerlessness reflects the remoteness of political institutions such as COP26 from people up and down the country who want more robust action on the climate emergency. It also reflects a gulf between the desire to do something and the knowledge of what to do. The same goes for young people: 2.5 million seven to 17-year-old Britons want increased teaching on the climate crisis in schools. The Institution of Engineering and Technology found recently that 68% of young people would like to work in green jobs, but 71% said that they lacked knowledge about those careers, which could stop them pursuing one.

That is a problem for our democracy but it is one that we can help to fix through our education system. The climate crisis is not going away, and if the purpose of our school system is, as a Labour Prime Minister once said,

“to equip children to the best of their ability for a lively, constructive place in society”,

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Ms Ghani. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) on securing this really important debate. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to it.

This topic has long been very close to my heart. In March 2013, I tabled an early-day motion to oppose the Government’s plan at that time to remove climate change from the national curriculum guidelines for key stages 1 to 3. That EDM cited the former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, who maintained that the exclusion of such issues represents an abdication of our duty to future generations. It is with that duty to current and future generations in mind that I will make the case for not just defending and strengthening the existing curriculum but, as others have argued for, going further, particularly with a natural history GCSE.

Lots of the focus so far this morning has, understandably, been on the climate. I will focus a little more on nature. Nearly half of all species in Britain are in decline. Species vital to our survival, such as the bee, are in catastrophic decline. In the past decade alone, we have lost a quarter of our hedgehogs and 30% of my favourite birds, swifts. How many people know that a single swift can fly up to 4 million miles in its life? How extraordinary is that? It can stay on the wing for two years; it does everything on the wing until it stops to mate and start a family. I could wax lyrical about the swift for the rest of my time, but I will not. It is that kind of love of nature that is so crucial for young people, both in its own right and because, as the wonderful writer Richard Louv said, “We won’t protect what we don’t love and we won’t love what we don’t know”. Here is an opportunity to really get to love the nature that we have around us.

The scale of the destruction of our wildlife is terrifying, and it is accelerating. Scientists warn that the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth is happening right now, bringing with it the real risk of a collapse of civilisation. A new GCSE in natural history, first proposed by the writer and naturalist, Mary Colwell, in 2011, will clearly not turn that around on its own, but it is a start.

I do not doubt that if you called for a debate on the swift, that would be just as well attended.