The conclusions of the December 2024 research report into climate literacy among school leavers in England makes worrying reading. The survey conclusions are republished below.

• My comments are in italics.

Through asking a selected sample of Year 11 school leavers in England a broad range of questions, this survey presents a nuanced view of climate literacy amongst school leavers. While there is a general awareness of anthropogenic global warming as a cause of climate change and its global impacts, there are several knowledge gaps and misconceptions demonstrated by the responses collected.

Basic knowledge:
While most school leavers recall having been taught about climate change, only just over half remember having covered it in their last year at school.

• As Climate change is an existential crisis for humanity, for almost half of students to go sailing through a year of school without being challenged to consider any aspect of it shows an alarming level of baked in complacency that we need to change.

There is a general understanding that the climate has warmed, but many overestimate the extent of warming since 1850. This specifically highlights a poor understanding of messaging related to limiting climate change to within 1.5°C/ 2°C, as many school leavers thought that the climate had already warmed more than this.

• This fits with a sort of “common sense” approach that uses shifts in temperature in everyday experience of weather as a benchmark. In that, a shift or 1 or 2 degerees doesn’t seem like much, but as an average shift across the whole planet, it has enormous consequences. Students will be seeing an increasing series of news items – on TV or social media – that show these disastrous impacts. The fires in LA and recent storms and floods here will be the latest. Stressing that these impacts are happening at just a 1.2C average increase; so increases above 1.5C or 2C will be so much worse, is essential to challenge this. Some students will have experienced climate impacts, like these: 1. “A primary school in Carlisle had classroom windows blown in during a lesson today, leading to kids diving under their desks. 86mph winds predicted and some HTs “bravely” opened. We’ve got a long way to go on the notion of “adapatation” as well as prevention.” 2. A school in Teeside evacuated due to storm damage after students placed on ‘lockdown’ https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/egglescliffe-school-evacuated-stockton-storm-30857248 These are new impacts that will become more common, so staff and students, LAs and Multi Academy Trusts should be aware of them and adapt their risk assessments accordingly.

Most school leavers are ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change but, for those communicating on climate change, it is worth noting that more are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ concerned about climate change than are ‘very concerned’.

• Without wanting students to be overwhelmed by anxiety, being lulled into complacency is doing them a profound disservice. It provides a foundation based on misunderstanding that allows for policies that backslide in a way that puts all our futures at risk.
  

Unsurprisingly, there is a correlation between those school leavers who think that climate change will affect them directly and those who are concerned about climate change.

• The obvious question here is, on what basis does anyone think climate change will not affect them? Recognising that this is a threat to all of us is the foundation for the necessary debates, policies and actions.

A substantial proportion do not appreciate that future global warming can still be limited or avoided.

• Students should not be left with this false impression. It leads to despair, fatalism, or indifference; none of which will help them address the crisis, either as individuals or citizens.
  

Causes of climate change
Most school leavers can identify carbon dioxide and methane as greenhouse gases and recognise that greenhouse gases affect the temperature of the Earth, but there are misconceptions regarding their respective sources. Similarly, whilst understanding of fossil fuels as a source of carbon dioxide is generally good, in general, the impact of natural causes of changes in the Earth’s climate and, in particular, orbital changes, are overstated. There is a lack of awareness of the contribution of cement to greenhouse gas emissions and uncertainty around wider sustainability issues relating to the production and use of plastics.

• The confusion around natural causes is understandable, given that in the long term – before humans -they have been more significant. It is important to clarify this because this fact is used to confuse understanding of what is happening now by ignoring the timescale for variations in the Earth’s orbit and tilt, which are over hundreds of thousands of years, and the impacts of solar activity (which on its own has been having a slightly cooling effect for the last few decades) or volcanoes, which tend to have a significant, but short term, cooling effect when they erupt.
• The misunderstandings about the causes of carbon emissions probably reflects the fact that a lot of cross school interventions on climate change come under an extracurricullar pastoral heading – like walk to school week, or a recycling drive. This reflects the weakness of whole school learning on climate as such, which will have to become a core part of the curriculum if it is to addressed.
  

As school leavers indicated a good awareness of which countries are currently emitting most greenhouse gas, but less awareness of per capita or historical emissions, this could be linked to a poor understanding of issues related to climate justice.

• This is likely to reflect awareness filtering in through media coverage, not school learning. It should be clarified so that students have an accurate picture of
• 1. who has done what since industrialisation since playing this down is a way to minimise the UK’s historic responsibility as the earliest industrial power and
• 2. what the per head carbon footprint is – which gives a more accurate picture of how sustainable different societies are than raw totals, though this should also be tempered with an understanding of consumption emissions, as contrasted with production emissions as, in an interdependent world, countries with economies that are primarily service based which have outsourced their carbon intensive heavy industry (like cement production) to other countries nevertheless consume the embodied carbon in their imports in a way that does not show up in statistics based on production.
• When you get bad faith political actors, and we are spoiled for choice for those, these misunderstandings provides wealthy countries with alibis, other countries to point fingers at, often unfairly, and represents the abdication of responsibility that is being pushed aggressively by climate deniers. For example, India has the third largest carbon emissions by volume, but has a per capita (per person) total of 2.7 tonnes – about half the global average – because it has a population greater than Europe, North and South America and Australasia combined. China has big overall emissions and a per capita footprint double the global average, but this is half the per capita footprint of countries like the USA, Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

Evidence for and impacts of climate change:

Many school leavers are aware of some indicators of a warming climate such as melting glaciers and rising sea levels, as well as of the impact of climate change on extreme weather events. However, there is limited understanding of the geographical distribution of future temperature changes and their impacts.

• Again, this will be as a result of the absence of systematic teaching and learning about the scale, scope and likely development of climate breakdown. Knowing about melting ice caps is more or less ground zero. If you don’t know this, you don’t really know anything. But being aware of patterns and projections is essential to avoid a solely impressionistic understanding based on a montage of news items as they come in, which, in the UK focus primarily on serious impacts 1. locally, 2. in other wealthy countries, especially the USA 3. in the global South. This also downplays the scale and potential social impact of these events as they already occur, which again engenders far more complacency than we can afford.
• A set of serious discussions about possible tipping points is also essential to overcome the false notion that climate change happens with remorseless gradualism, implying that when it hits harder we will still be able to outrun it; whereas it is more likely that if we let things get away from us, the harder impacts will be of a greater intensity, faster velocity and so widespread that they could sweep us away like an incoming tsunami.
  

Mitigation and Adaptation:
In general, the survey indicated low awareness of these two aspects of climate action, and in particular of climate mitigation strategies. Furthermore, there is a varied understanding between these two approaches, with school leavers often misinterpreting mitigation strategies as adaptation. The impacts of keeping pets and eating meat are generally underestimated whereas the impact of switching lights off
and recycling (from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions) is overestimated.

• The strategies school leavers consider effective are those they have done, or been encouraged to do, at school. Switch the lights off when you leave the classroom. Recycle your stuff. Do schools put what they put in their school dinners up front as part of their climate action plan? They should, and be prepared to have the debate with staff, students and school communities – in the same way that many schools with many Muslim students did when they adopted Halal meat as a default.
• But, all these examples are in the category of individual actions which, though essential, have too often been used as a distraction to avoid strategic social, political and economic policy choices at society level about use of fossil fuels, industrial farming, construction materials and methods (and who controls those), town planning, transport policy and so on.
• Whether students can identify whether a given action is mitigation or adaptation, or both, is surely a secondary issue to whether they think they are necessary, for themselves as individuals and/or for everyone as citizens. While its better to be clear, there is a slight echo here of Goveish assumptions that if you can name a part of speech you know how to use language effectively.

Concepts such as the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, and net zero, are very poorly understood. With ‘net zero’ in particular being a phrase which is in widespread use, from the Department for Education’s Climate Change and Sustainability Education Strategy to employers and the media, lack of understanding of it is both surprising and concerning.

• If it isn’t taught, it won’t be understood. The consequences of average temperature rises of 1.5C and 2C, or worse, are widely published. It should be the core of teaching about what we need to do to limit the incoming damage that students have a firm grasp of these projections and understand the basics of the processes that produce them through the IPCC and that this reflects the firm conviction of 97-99% of the world’s scientists.
• Given the relentless attacks on “Net Zero madness” and “Net Zero zealots” in the media, having a firm grasp of what the term means is essential to be able to navigate what is becoming an increasingly fraught debate based, primarily, on misleading or factually innaccurate arguments from vested interests with a lot of resources to try to conceptually turn reality upside down. We should not leave our students vulnerable to the suggestion that it is the people who want action for a sustainable future who are “mad” or unreasonably zealous, while those who want to carry on as we are until we hit a series of devastating crises, that we won’t be able to recover from, are somehow the sane ones.
• Discussions about Net Zero vs Zero carbon emissions raise important issues concerning the limitations of carbon offsets, especially as they are actually used.

If climate education is to raise awareness of green careers and, more generally, to increase hope in our ability to take collective climate action, increased awareness of mitigation and adaptation strategies is vitally important.

• It is also important for students, who will still be quite young by 2050, to grasp that a failure to decarbonise our society will make us all significantly poorer, even if society avoids collapse altogether. It might help if the Chancellor of the Exchequer had an inkling of this too.

Climate Change in the UK:
In general, there is very poor awareness of the projected impacts of climate change in the UK, the need to adapt, mitigation strategies already in place and of the cost benefits of mitigation rather than adaptation.

• This, again, reflects the unsystematic and fundamentally unserious character of learning about climate in the UK. These are average results, and some schools do fantastic work, especially if they are signed up to Lets Go Zero, Ministry of Eco Education, Eco Schools, or they have a Local Authority that takes this as seriously as they do in Brighton or Leicester for example, or they have an inspirational Head teacher who is on the mission that, frankly, all Head teachers should be on; but that also means that many schools will be doing far too little in the absence of the thorough commitment to climate education that we need running throigh the entire national curriculum. An example of this is that even an officially supported, and very good, initiative like the National Nature Park has only be signed up to by about 10% of schools. This is absurd.
• Leaving students with the fundamental misunderstanding that the “costs of Net Zero” are greater than the consequences of failing to meet it – which they will have picked up from deliberately misleading media coverage without a thorough going rebuttal in schools- lays them open to dishonest political manipulation that will put their future at risk.

This will be directly relevant to school leavers’ awareness of the green careers available to them. Whereas school leavers were aware of the contribution of melting ice to sea level rise in the UK, they were less
aware of the contribution of the expansion of sea water as it warms, which has made an approximately equal contribution historically. It could be argued that this reflects a need for science teachers to be able to demonstrate that learning in the sciences has applications and contexts relevant to climate change.

• The overall conception we should be trying to develop is that every job, every career, will have to be green, because every job will have to be sustainable. There can’t be a “green sector” that maintains peceful coexistence with unsustainable sectors; as the key thing we have to grasp is that we have to make all sectors sustainable and all jobs greener, so the process will be the growth of the former and the shrinking of the latter to ever more residual roles.

Communication:
There is a substantial knowledge gap regarding the level of scientific consensus on climate change, with most thinking agreement amongst scientists is notably lower than it is. This potentially relates to past and present education policy related to presenting a ‘balanced’ argument for global warming. Knowledge of international organisations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also limited. Trust in climate information from science teachers and the BBC is high, but lower for politicians and tabloid newspapers.

• This substantial knowledge gap needs to be closed, and fast. This is not simply down to ludicrous notions that it was necessary to have a “balanced” discussion between an almost universal scientific consensus and a few fossil fuel funded mavericks, as if the two had equal weight, but also the previous government’s successful attempt to freeze debate on the social implications of climate change with its “impartiality guidance”, which put campaigning organisations on a blacklist that should not be invited in. This guidance should be scrapped, and the no holds barred debate on how we are going to construct our own futures unleashed.
• The understanding that the climate breakdown projections we are working to limit are the product of a thorough and painstaking research and analysis, that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a UN body and its findings are subscribed to by 195 governments (out of 198) worldwide; so represents an international government consensus as well as a scientific one is essential. As is the understanding that countries, no matter how weighty they are in the world, that break with the science do not have a valid point of view, but are going rogue.
• That students trust science teachers most underlines the point that schools have the tresponsibility to present them with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This trust is likely to extend to other teachers in so far as climate is dealt with, as it should be, across the curriculum. There are three levels to our response to this.
• 1. The current national curriculm review should incorporate climate learning into the national curriculum in all subjects and in an age appropriate way in all key stages. Part of this will have to be turning, appropriate, anxiety into purposeful action, for individuals, schools, communities and in campaigning/debating ways forward to future proof ourselves in a just transition. If it falls short of this, it will not be providing an appropriate curriculum for the Anthropocene.
• 2. that will require us to campaign for the DFE to create and mandate additional learning to close all of these gaps in understanding.
• 3. If they fail to do that, we will have to mobilise through our unions and campaigning organisations to produce such material ourselves – from posters, to lesson and assembly plans, to webinars/online learning materials for colleagues to adapt – and push them through during the trade union year of action starting in September, to build such learning into every school’s climate action plan.
• Trust in “politicians” is low. This isn’t clearly differentiated, because some politicians are more trustworthy than others. But now that we have every Party from the Conservatives rightwards explicitly opposing action to meet “Net Zero” – thereby breaking with the scientific imperative to meet it – it becomes even more important for schools to ground our future citizens in the facts of the world they will be dealing with. As there is no need to teach a balance between scientific reality and denial, Parties that break from the scientific reality, and fail to rise to the challenge of meeting it, are putting themselves outside consideration as relevant forces that should be taken seriously.
• Students, sensibly enough, do not trust the tabloids. But the BBC, which they trust more, often has its news agenda, and the framework they put stories in, set by them. Looking at trust, or distrust, in social media will also be a vital part of developing critical awareness of bias and manipulation in media coverage. Perhaps counting the number of times that the tabloids attach phrases like “madness” to “net zero” or “swivel eyed” to “targets”, might make a revealing set of graphs…

A personal note

This image is a montage of times. The factory in the background is the Wouldham cement works in Thurrock in 1951.

The photo is on the wall in the Grays branch of Morrisons, which has a nice line in sepia industrial nostalgia. The Wouldham was already a ruin by the 1960s, but there were several other huge cement works along the side of the Thames up towards Purfleet.

Growing up back then on the wrong side of the prevailing winds is probably one reason I’m so prone to coughs. All these plants are now gone. Lakeside has taken their place. The carbon, and pollution, footprint of retail is a lot less than that of cement, which has been outsourced to other countries, which suffer the pollution and have to carry the can for the carbon footprint, even when some of the products are exported back here.

The Wouldham is significant for me in another respect. My great grandfather, John Henry Ellis, worked there and was killed in an industrial accident – falling into one of the storage tanks he worked in in 1931.