"I just felt that, as a geography teacher, preparing students for what will be a very uncertain future was the most important thing that I could do."

"It all comes down to creating opportunities for the children to take part in meaningful action." says Cox, as the break bell rings and a crescendo of chattering children echo in the corridor behind her. "I can’t emphasise this enough. We can help them understand that they can make a difference. By acting constructively, pupils can transform worry into hope."

For the past 14 years Cox has lived this philosophy daily within the walls and grounds of Dorset private school Dumpton. Her zeal stems from her background as a geographer who, as she puts it, "outgrew the framework". She wanted more for her pupils than just a weekly trip to Eco Club. Cox is keen that pupils can learn about sustainability in ways that help them understand the interconnected challenges of our time, and develop the skills and mindset that will help them respond and grow into compassionate, responsible changemakers.

She is also passionate about ensuring that learning about climate and nature is woven right through the curriculum. "Safeguarding our future is everybody's responsibility. So the aim is to embed sustainability education into the culture of a school rather than it being an add-on that gets disregarded when other priorities like inspection criteria appear."

The plan she came up with as a result – the global citizenship pathway – is built around three guiding principles: what pupils learn (curriculum), what they do (action), and who they become (character education).

Dumpton’s approach to emotional literacy is also a key part of the plan. The Covid pandemic brought an increased focus on awareness of emotions at the school, and it adopted the RULER approach – an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. RULER supports entire school communities in:

• Understanding the value of emotions
• Building the skills of emotional intelligence
• Creating and maintaining positive school climates

Pupils are encouraged to Recognise, Understand, Label, Express and Regulate complex emotions, including those that arise from thinking about climate change.

Cox is an enthusiastic advocate for being straightforward with pupils (in an age-appropriate way) about the climate and nature crises, and facilitating open conversation about how to process and respond to those feelings:

I actually tend to avoid the word crisis or emergency because I think with the age of children in front of us, it can be really daunting at times. But if students are feeling overwhelmed, we talk about it a lot. When we deliver a topic we don't hide from the facts. We're quite blunt about them, in an age appropriate way. And then we very much talk about – how does that make you feel? As staff, we can share appropriately some of the feelings that we have.

Cox says that adults explaining and labelling some of their own emotions appropriately is quite helpful to young people: "It normalises some difficult feelings – if grown ups are feeling like this too and saying it’s ok to feel this way, then that in itself can be reassuring. When we take this further by showing them how to channel feelings into positive daily action, this can really help alleviate anxiety."

Pupils are empowered to get involved in positive, practical action that helps them feel like they are making a real difference on issues, taking part in a range of projects. Cox taught her Year 8 class about the impacts of the fast fashion industry on garment workers in Asia. She wanted pupils to empathise with the workers, but to then translate that feeling into doing something tangible.

"We have a question that we ask quite often, which is – is this situation unacceptable? Unanimously you'll get back from children, yes, it's really unacceptable. Then you ask a different question, which is, is it unacceptable enough for you to change your behaviour? So that means that you don’t buy from these brands that everyone else is wearing and you don’t promote these products because consumerism and overproduction are all linked to the climate crisis and all the impacts. This is tricky for children and teens in a world where social blending is so important, so we explore that emotion as well. I’ve found that children do really want to make positive change."

What resulted was a sustainable fashion show, with customised second hand clothing sold to raise money for DIRT, a charity that supports regenerative agriculture projects. Even this wasn’t the end of the project as pupils found ways to distribute leftover clothing to local families so that they didn’t end up in landfill via charity shops.

Cox is most proud of how pupils were fully involved in planning the project. "I gave them a little nudge, but they came up with designing what they wanted to do. They led it. I stepped back and just watched it unfold. About three or four months later, they came back to me and said, 'we want to continue to do this as a legacy for the school'. So they established their own pre-loved pop-up shop, which we run twice a year."

The ethos has also given a social justice framing to traditional harvest activities. Rather than simply donating produce to a foodbank, children grew vegetables which they turned into chutneys and sold to their families. Using this money they then went round the supermarket with staff coaching them on the most useful and nutritious food to buy for the foodbank.

The ripple effect of the global citizenship pathway has been substantial. One mum emailed Cox to say her daughter hadn’t bought any new clothes in the past year, another child asked for a yoghurt maker for Christmas because she didn’t want any more plastic pots in the house.

Cox is now thinking about how she can replicate what’s worked at Dumpton and take it into other independent schools in her new role as a consultant.

She is realistic about the challenge for teachers like her that want to spread environmental awareness amongst pupils. She’s very aware that working at an independent school means she has had freedoms that her peers in the state sector haven’t had. But some significant resilience of her own has been required to embed sustainability education at Dumpton, a process she describes as 'really challenging' despite support from her head.

"I just sort of rolled whole school initiatives out of my geography department. I didn't really ask permission, I just did them. The results were good and the children were gaining and buzzing."

She started by asking for a day of the timetable to plan climate-related activities. This was successful so they repeated it the following year, which then led naturally to the whole-school projects that allowed children to feel like they were doing something about the problems they were learning about.

Once this process took off, Cox encouraged everyone to weave references to climate education right throughout the day. This process was tricky with some; Cox recalls the French teacher saying that she 'couldn’t teach climate education in French' to primary-aged pupils.

Cox suggested that she just encourage her pupils to perhaps talk in French about going to their weekly Eco club, and teach them relevant vocabulary, like ‘recycling’. "You're just gently drip-feeding that message all the time. It's just those subtle changes that embed sustainability education all the way through the curriculum that make it normal."

Cox also found that her Pathway material was helpful for students that were struggling academically, but weren’t keen on sports, music or drama either. "Everyone participates in the global citizenship pathway, and so everybody achieves and makes a difference because everyone engages in the action. Because sustainability is embedded across all of our subjects, staff are reinforcing the message all the time without the children really even realising that that's happening. They then naturally develop character traits that we want them to develop – the resilience, the courage, the collaboration."

This case study was written by Claire Murphy.