"As a school leader, you've got to create a culture where climate change becomes everybody's responsibility. Because if we don't do it now, who is going to do it?"

Mark Whittaker clearly remembers the point when he started to really appreciate the gravity of climate change. He emerged from a workshop held by Climate Adapted Pathways in Education (CAPE) somewhat shaken.

"I think everybody left with equal anxiety, even though we may not have known what it was we were there for. But it was a big awakening for me, around my own commitment to climate change and what I was going to do personally, but also then what we could do as a school to educate the children," he says.

Whittaker was there because his employer, Northern Star Academy Trust, asked all its school leaders to go along to get acquainted with the climate crisis and look for ways to embed this into their teaching. The trust's CEO, Jenn Plews, is a passionate advocate for climate education, and Whittaker credits her leadership with shifting attitudes across the trust's 15 schools in West Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Plews has set up two trust-wide boards to facilitate sustainability-related projects across the schools. The Green Futures board brings together two staff from each school – from headteachers to teaching assistants – while the Next Generation board includes two children from each school. Both help schools learn from each other and develop projects that suit their context.

At Eastwood School, where Whittaker was previously headteacher, this meant bringing in volunteers from a local company to restore two neglected allotments.

Eastwood was also involved in a groundbreaking study exploring how different approaches to climate teaching affect pupils' anxiety levels.

In the summer term of 2024, researchers ran twice weekly sessions in 14 UK schools, including two Year 5 classes at Eastwood. One class expressed their feelings about climate change through art alone; the other combined art with discussion. The pattern was replicated across all schools. The study found that anxiety reduced more significantly in children who had discussion as well as art – not just art alone.

The results echo previous work on 'radical hope'. This is an approach that acknowledges climate change's negative impacts and the distress it brings, while holding onto the possibility of a better future. Fostering radical hope in children, the researchers suggest, means making space to explore despair while working toward improving the planet’s condition. But the researchers sound a note of caution:

Caution is warranted in how awareness is raised about the importance of social action with children. This may add to the weight some already carry on their shoulders, placing them at a heightened risk of guilt and activist burnout.

Whittaker found the results interesting, and is still thinking about how he might apply them to climate change education at the school he now leads – Greatwood Community Primary and Nursery School.

His priority is to ensure that teachers have the right mindset for teaching children about climate change. "Teachers reflect society, don't they? And so there are some teachers that are absolutely on board that climate change is a real thing and is important in education. And then you've got some teachers that pay lip service rather than giving it their all."

Whittaker’s response to sceptical teachers is simply to share the science. "I’ll say look at the scientific evidence. If we don't teach it, look at what's going to happen. We're not going to meet net zero. We're not going to get one degree. They're going to have to live with two and a half degrees."

Supporting teachers' climate knowledge is one challenge. But Whittaker believes there's a bigger one: too many teachers are coming out of training without the skills to empathise with pupils.

"I do think that's something that's lacking on the whole, dealing with children's emotions and their lack of understanding of what they're feeling. They might say 'oh, you need to re-regulate yourself, or are you feeling sad?' Sometimes children don't know what happy or what sad is. They don't understand why they're having a meltdown. They don't understand why they've just thrown a pencil across the room." What’s important is "a teacher's ability, to be able to deal with that".

Whittaker points to skills that allow a teacher to understand a child’s behaviour: "You know, this has happened or he's quiet today because his dog's died, or he's watched a David Attenborough film and it's really pushed him over the edge a little bit with climate."

Whittaker thinks that one part of the solution might lie in the way that student teachers are currently managed in their early years in schools. His hunch is that rather than use them as glorified teaching assistants, they would gain more relational abilities by shadowing teachers so that they pick up on the ways that teachers speak to pupils in the playground and at breaks.

It's these relational skills, Whittaker believes, that will equip teachers to support children through the emotions that an unstable future brings.

This case study was written by Claire Murphy.