Building on bildung

The National Curriculum for England framework contains exactly zero mentions of the word sustainability. Perhaps it needs a splash of bildung - if we can find out what that means.

We’ve talked several times this year about embedding climate change and sustainability (CC&S) into education. We suspect we will continue to do so in 2024. We opined on the subject just last week, while in a post in July we looked at the European sustainability competence framework, GreenComp, and considered how the competences it identifies could be fed into schools education – in Europe at least, if not in post-Brexit Britain. And back in May we looked beyond school-age education and blue-skied around engineers starting with a hub of sustainability, into which the spokes of engineer-y type specialities like design, manufacturing, operations and so on could then be fitted.

Image: @learnsustainability / TGE

There certainly seems to be the appetite for it amongst young people. A European Parliament Briefing in September cited a 2019 survey that found more than 60% of them think protecting the environment against climate change should be one of the main priorities for the EU, while two in five believe climate change and eco-friendly behaviour is not taught sufficiently in schools. The briefing went on to conclude:

Although there is increasing activity in education and training on the environment and sustainability, learning for sustainability is not yet a systematic feature of education policy and practice across Europe.

Source: European Parliament

That’s Europe, of course, not the UK. Better here? Unlikely, we feel. We observe, for example, the survey of teachers in England carried out by UCL earlier this year, which drew glum conclusions about levels of professional development in CC&S for teachers, and use of school buildings and grounds to support CC&S teaching (despite DfE asserting in its CC&S strategy that it would ‘[consider the] education estate as a virtual National Education Nature Park’).

The survey also found a few telling points about the English CC&S curriculum. First, that teaching related to CC&S is most prevalent in geography and in science, and at secondary level. Does it fit into other subjects? Certainly. A glance through England’s National Curriculum for Key Stage 3 History, for example, gives the impact on society in Britain as the first industrial nation as a topic in the teaching of ideas, political power, industry and empire in Britain between 1745-1901. But what about its impact on the environment and the lessons to be learnt for today’s attempts to undo it?

Next, the survey found that teaching related to CC&S is included to a lesser extent in subjects such as citizenship, art and design, business studies, design and technology, English/literacy and personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE). Oh, well that’s good it’s being included, we suppose. But why to a lesser extent in subjects like design and technology, when – as we reported in August – the Design Council is making Design for Planet front and centre, and RIBA is making a big thing of sustainable outcomes? That’s before we even start to consider how the building of sustainability mindsets could be incorporated into citizenship and PSHE.

Finally, UCL found that the majority of respondents said that it was a priority for CC&S to feature more strongly in the National Curriculum. At this point, we asked ourselves how strongly CC&S features at the moment and, out of curiosity, we did a word search for the number of mentions of the words ‘sustainable’ or ‘sustainability’ in the current national curriculum in England framework. The answer, we found, is zero. To be sure we then did a similar search through all the key stage programmes for English, Mathematics, Science, Art and Design, Citizenship, Computing, Design and Technology, Geography, History, Languages, Music, and Physical Education. Told you we were geeks, didn’t we! Anyway, the answer is still zero.

Going on to compare England’s National Curriculum with Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, which puts sustainability as ‘a cross-curricular approach to build a socially just, sustainable and equitable society’, and the new Curriculum for Wales where ‘sustainability is mandatory and will form part of every learner's education throughout their learning journey’, we suspect UCL’s ‘majority of respondents’ were pulling a punch or two. Sustainability should feature more strongly in the English National Curriculum? Make that: sustainability should feature – period!

That’s not to say CC&S isn’t being taught in English schools, mind – although it’s not necessarily being taught by the teachers themselves. For example, we heard recently about Teach the Teacher, which ‘trains groups of young people in schools to give their teachers lessons on climate change and what it’s like being a young person during the climate emergency’. The initiative is hosted by SOS-UK, who we also talked to recently about the work it’s doing to retrofit sustainability into the education system, notably an initiative called Track Changes, which applies a sustainability lens to the National Curriculum. In our view, this makes much sense and can be illustrated by this simple ‘tracked change’ to a single item of subject content in the Design and Technology Key Stage 3 programme:

Image: TGE

See how that works? SOS-UK tells us it’s done all the mainstream secondary GCSE subjects and is now working on the primary curriculum before moving on to A levels. We look forward to seeing where that might go, perhaps under the potential government-in-waiting, which we hear is championing the cause.

Looking internationally, which countries might we point to as leaders in embedding sustainability in education? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Nordics are up there with the best. As far as we can see, they’re all doing the embedding bit and they’re all getting stuck in to that good outdoor education and experiential learning stuff, often with projects and through partnerships with NGOs and businesses. They’re teaching their kids to be active citizens who think critically and understand the importance of renewable energy, environmental stewardship, well-being and sustainable lifestyles, and taking global perspectives.

There still remain some concerns, though. A 2021 report for the Nordic Council of Ministers found that:

Inclusion of sustainability in educational policies in Finland, Norway, and Sweden builds on a long tradition of environmental education and has, in many ways, been more consistent than in Iceland or Denmark. However…when looking at teacher preparation in some of the Nordic countries the importance of sustainability education is often better addressed in political rhetoric than in educational reality.

Source: norden.org

The competency of teachers to handle the tricky and complex sustainability questions aside, perhaps a key factor is the bildung tradition in Nordic education. Bildung refers to education as a moral development with a strong social undertone, and, as described in the aforementioned report, is often directly related to sustainability or issues of similar concern. And the concern for sustainability is real. To return to a sustainable world, we must engage, educate and motivate whole populations. This is not all about innovation and technology, as some may like us to believe. A huge part is about hearts and minds, and citizen education and behaviour.

There is no direct English translation for bildung. Perhaps we should try to find one.