"We see our job as connecting the children to themselves, others, and the natural world and through this to take collaborative action"

Jim Dees and his colleagues watched with dismay at the lack of impetus coming out of the COP climate meetings during 2018 and 2019. "We just thought, we need to do something ourselves to help the children have a sense of agency around climate," he recalls.

Like many schools during the difficult pandemic years, getting the children outdoors became a constant activity. But West Lodge built on this need by thinking about how they could encourage a more fundamental link between pupils and nature. Sanne Aldrich, the Sustainability Leader at the time, started a community gardening club on Saturday mornings, open to children, parents and teachers. Spurred on by taking part in the Eden Project’s changemakers programme, she began to drive more change.

The club turned out to be a seed that has now germinated a whole school focus on sustainability that is woven right through the curriculum. Five years later the club still exists, and has been joined by a whole range of projects designed to build the connection between children and nature. A Nature Bugs group of pupils, overseen by Lucy Taylor, the school’s art leader, now explores ways to make art using natural found objects. The emphasis throughout has been on building children's relationship with the natural world – the foundation, Dees believes, for resilience in the face of climate change.

As Dees and his colleagues have learned more, from a diverse range of consultants and from their own work, they have moved progressively from individual projects to more of a whole-school vision. Rachel Sawle, who leads science and sustainability, is overseeing the whole approach and West Lodge is now one of 16 pioneer schools looking at ways to teach sustainability within other subjects, under the supervision of University College London’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education’s Teaching for Sustainable Futures programme. Ciaran Finnegan, who leads maths, worked with Dr Nasreen Majid from UCL to create a Maths unit of work linked to sustainability.

A project to reduce West Lodge’s carbon footprint in collaboration with the Green Schools Project resulted in the school caterers, Nourish, acquiring a composter. This has now provided a springboard for the school to teach the children about composting in science lessons. Maths lessons have also been enhanced by integrating data from biodiversity monitoring on the school fields – pupils were using scale drawings and fractions.

Dees reflects: "Doing this in a meaningful way is quite hard. We don’t want to dilute our maths content with a tenuous link." But the maths lead has now created a unit of work for Year 5s that is currently being taught and has been very successful.

West Lodge tries to make its sustainability education as experiential and pupil-led as possible, to maximise children’s sense of involvement in making a difference to climate change.

In 2023, in conjunction with teaching consultant Alex Bell, it created YES (Youth Eco Summit) Fest, inviting 8-10 year olds from 12 schools, drawn from right across the UK. The children rotated around activities linked to nature connection, enhancing biodiversity and taking climate action. There was also a live link to the Eden Project. After the event, students were facilitated to tell their peers back at their own schools about what they’d learnt, and set up projects to act on the challenges they’d heard about.

At West Lodge, this led to monitoring one of the local rivers for pollutants, and setting up an eco-refill shop, with Pupils Profit, selling environmentally-friendly washing liquids to parents.

Since this first event in 2023, YESfest has grown, with events held in Lancashire, New York, the Eden project in Cornwall and two follow-ups in Harrow.

But embedding sustainability across the curriculum is only part of West Lodge's approach. Equally important is tending to children's inner lives.

It’s the Young Ambassadors for Peace project, created by the Brahma Kumaris Inner Space Meditation and Self Development Centre in nearby Wembley that is arguably providing the most emotionally-attuned contribution to sustainability education at West Lodge. It revolves around three pillars – peace with self, peace with others, and peace with nature, and introduces pupils to the spiritual, moral, social, and cultural aspects of sustainability.

On a more practical level, pupils have all been taught to meditate, and this now happens for the whole school community, three times a day. "We all pause and have a peace moment," explains Dees. In a school day packed with content and pressure, this pause has become sacred.

"We see so many children with anxiety generally, from social media, friendships, and exam pressure as well as climate change. We see our job as connecting the children to themselves, others, and the natural world and through this to take collaborative action. We don’t want them to be overwhelmed so we don’t go into too much detail about the challenges of climate change, but if pupils feel connected to themselves and the treasure chest of inner qualities they have, and they feel connected to nature, they hopefully then develop more pro-environmental behaviours. We’ve really seen children’s self-esteem grow, and their sense of personal responsibility."

A parent of a Year 5 young ambassador fed back that their son now has a much higher awareness of his emotions and a greater respect for his own sensitivity, thanks to the peace in nature module.

Dees is clear on what is needed to facilitate more emotionally-literate climate education in classrooms across the country: "We should be treating sustainability as a core subject like English, maths or science. We need more autonomy to be creative, and to create more space in the curriculum."

This case study was written by Claire Murphy.