After the recent COP 28 event in Dubai, there is once again a major focus on how we reverse the impacts of climate change and, within that, how we help future generations meet that challenge.

But a new Gallup-Unicef poll of children and young people in 55 countries, including the UK, suggests that while most children surveyed say they have heard of climate change, only half understand what it is.

The poll also explores the primary sources of news and information for young people. While social media claimed the top spot, only 23 per cent of those surveyed have a lot of trust in the information on those platforms. It is the least trusted information source across all institutions in the poll.

Dull lessons that lack impact

So what role should schools play in providing reliable knowledge to children on climate change? And has the Department for Education’s sustainability and climate change strategy had an impact some 18 months after its publication?

Unfortunately not, it seems. As I visit schools and observe lessons across the country, children say they are fed up with what they see as schools’ piecemeal attitude to climate education. At their worst, lessons are “dull”, “dominated by worksheets or PowerPoints” and “lack any impact”.

In secondary schools especially, many pupils feel their teachers don’t know enough about the climate to genuinely engage with them on the topic and feel that lessons focusing purely on the negative effects of climate change fail to inspire them to change behaviours.

Children want more than the bland diet they are currently fed in this topic. They want to carry out projects in schools that make a genuine difference to the climate and apply what they learn about climate change in their daily lives.

They also want to be able to go home and teach their parents how to change their ways.

No time, no money

Headteachers in England, though, especially in secondary schools, tell me their hands are tied. The pressures put on schools to improve exam results year on year squeeze formal curriculum time to focus mostly on examination subjects.

And with so many other topics to teach within personal, social, health, citizenship and economics lessons, the reality is that none of these areas is covered in any depth in schools.

As one headteacher told me: “We just tick as many boxes within PSHCE themes as possible, in order to satisfy Ofsted when they inspect us. We don’t engage meaningfully in any of them.”

Another headteacher said her school was so short of money that teaching anything outside a traditional curriculum is almost impossible.

And one claimed that she had no money to train her teachers on how to adequately teach climate education.

For many headteachers and schoolchildren, it seems that the gap between government strategy on climate education and what schools are able to deliver could not be wider.

The Welsh way

But the picture over the border in Wales is not nearly as gloomy.

Cardiff’s local authority has placed schools at the heart of its One Planet Cardiff strategy to be a carbon-free city by 2030. In partnership with Our Classroom Climate (OCC), Cardiff has become the first local authority in the UK to offer algae bioreactors to all its schools.

These “liquid trees” capture carbon dioxide at a rate up to 400 times faster than traditional trees and sit within a much broader climate education curriculum for the city’s children.

Meanwhile, at the Cardiff Schools Climate Education Conference in November, pupils from Llysfaen Primary School, in the north of city, talked about forming an eco-committee to help plan the projects in the school that combat climate change.

External speakers and local experts in climate change are regularly invited to the school on their Green Days to talk to the children about how they can better protect the planet.

Further west, and following Our Classroom Climate’s curriculum, children at Ysgol Pen Rhos, in Llanelli, have been analysing the optimal conditions for algae to thrive, and subsequently growing algae under the best conditions to effectively capture carbon every day.

There seems to be a movement in climate education sweeping across schools in South Wales, which is enabled by the country’s new Curriculum for Wales.

Headteachers at the event spoke about how the flexibility of the curriculum allows them to delve deeply into cross-curricular themes such as climate change.

Teachers are being upskilled through partnerships between schools and climate education organisations, which are brokered and encouraged by some local authorities. Resources, materials and ideas are also being provided for teachers and shared between them.

While there may not be an exam in the topic of climate change, the fact that a YouGov survey conducted on behalf of the Woodland Trust in March found that seven out of 10 young people in Britain are worried about climate change and its effects shows there is arguably no more important a subject for our children to learn.

Professor Geraint Jones is the executive director and associate pro vice-chancellor of the National Institute of Teaching and Education at Coventry University