From Curriculum Myth to Curriculum Reality in Climate Change Education
The Curriculum and Assessment Review (Department for Education, 2025) makes clear that climate change now shapes the physical landscape, the economy, and the conditions in which children and young people will live and work. It emphasises that children and young people should leave school with a secure understanding of its causes and consequences, alongside the knowledge needed, to respond to the challenges ahead.
The Review (Department for Education, 2025) sets out a clear rationale for prioritising a knowledge-rich climate change education within the structural architecture of a subject’s discipline. This requires careful attention to the knowledge children and young people need to explore, how that knowledge is sequenced, and how understanding develops over time. The following extract from National Geographic Kids illustrates the type of scientific and geographical knowledge children are often expected to engage with when learning about climate change:
“The Earth’s average temperature has increased about 1.5°F in the past hundred years. It doesn’t sound like much, but scientists think that the temperature increase has caused melting glaciers, drought, and coral reef die-off. (Coral can’t survive in water that’s too warm.) Scientists expect the climate will warm another 0.5°F to 8.6°F by the year 2100” (Shaw, 2017).
To understand this extract, children need existing knowledge of what average temperature means, how temperature is measured and compared over time, and why small numerical changes can have significant physical effects. They also need prior understanding of glaciers, drought, and coral reefs, including basic knowledge about water, climate patterns, and the conditions living organisms need to survive.
If the ambition and potential set out in the Curriculum and Assessment Review (Department for Education, 2025) is to be realised, the sector must acknowledge and move beyond the myths that have emerged about climate change education. These myths divert attention and resources away from the careful work required to establish clear end points, deliberate sequencing, and visible progression for children and young people over time, all of which are essential to a knowledge-rich curriculum.
The myths we need to overcome
Myth one: Schools already have a knowledge-rich curriculum for climate change education in place, and the implemented curriculum has had a measurable impact on the knowledge of children and young people.
This myth assumes climate change education is good enough, even when it remains unclear what children and young people understand, how their knowledge develops, or where gaps persist.
Myth two: The science behind the natural and enhanced greenhouse effect is well understood by teachers.
This myth leads to the greenhouse effect being taught in simplified or misleading ways, leaving children and young people with gaps and misconceptions about how it works.
Myth three: Climate change can be taught generically, outside of subject knowledge.
This myth leads to climate change being taught in isolated or surface-level ways, without the pre-requisite disciplinary knowledge needed for children and young people to build secure, cumulative understanding.
Myth four: Climate change knowledge is fixed.
This myth treats climate change as fully settled, rather than helping children and young people understand that while the causes are well established, knowledge about impacts, mitigation, and adaptation continues to develop.
Myth five: Decarbonisation of the school estate is climate change education
This myth narrows climate change education to reducing emissions and taking climate action, sidelining the ethical, political, and subject-based knowledge children and young people need to understand climate change in depth.
Myth six: Developing a knowledge-rich climate change curriculum is easy
This myth assumes that because the science exists, building a knowledge-rich curriculum is straightforward, overlooking the conceptual complexity involved and the careful sequencing required to support children and young people’s developmental needs.
Overcoming the six myths of climate change education by building a beautiful curriculum
Globally children and young people report that climate change education does not equip them with the depth of understanding they need to make sense of its complexity or its implications for their lives (UNESCO, 2022). This points to a systemic curriculum challenge. When children and young people describe gaps in understanding, the response from educators calls for careful attention to how climate change is taught, where it sits within subjects, and how understanding develops over time.
One useful way of responding to this challenge is through the concept of a beautiful curriculum. Grounded in Mary Myatt’s (2021) notion of beautiful work, a beautiful curriculum is carefully constructed, intellectually ambitious, and rooted in respect for children and young people. Beauty is brought to life through coherence, quality, and care. It reflects an entitlement for children and young people to encounter ideas that are organised well, revisited thoughtfully, and taken seriously over time. Climate change education benefits from this approach because deep understanding develops through deliberate sequencing, rather than through the superficial accumulation of generic facts.
Over the past two years, CAPE has led on the development of curriculum guidance for teachers and school leaders through a sustained and collective process grounded in disciplinary integrity. This work recognises that climate change education gains coherence when subjects retain their shape. Science, geography, and art each offer distinct ways of knowing, and each requires careful attention to its own concepts, practices, and traditions. Our groundbreaking guidance has been developed in collaboration with subject associations, teachers, researchers, charities, and expert organisations. This reflects a shared commitment to building high-quality climate change education through collective expertise. The work has been deliberate, involving testing ideas, challenging assumptions, and repeatedly returning to what children and young people need to understand as they encounter climate change through different subjects.
However, climate change education places particular demands on the curriculum. It involves complex scientific ideas, ethical and political questions, and emotional responses that develop over time. When this learning is left to isolated activities, individual interests, or one-off initiatives, learning risks becoming shallow. For this reason, we have taken a mechanisms-led approach. The mechanisms provide a clear organising structure for curriculum design, ensuring that climate change education is intentional, coherent, and developmentally appropriate.
Across the guidance, subject-specific climate change education is shaped through three connected mechanisms (Hoath and Dave, 2024):
Knowledge gives children and young people access to ideas, concepts, and explanations that help them make sense of climate change within and across subjects, ensuring knowledge acquisition and retrieval is secure and cumulative.
Self-regulation supports children and young people to engage with challenging ideas and emotional responses, enabling reflection, resilience, and a growing sense of agency as understanding develops.
Collective action connects understanding to shared responsibility, helping children and young people see how individual and collective responses relate, and supporting the development of self-efficacy.
Together, these mechanisms ensure that climate change education is deliberate and structured. Our three curriculum guides bring this approach to life across three primary subjects:
Science: Supports children to develop secure understanding of underpinning scientific knowledge, such as states of matter and what carbon is, which is essential for understanding the natural and enhanced greenhouse effect, climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation.
Geography: Develops knowledge of place, scale, patterns, and human–environment relationships, supporting understanding of climate change as a spatial, temporal and social phenomenon.
Art: Offers ways of making and representing that support interpretation, complexity, and meaning, enabling children and young people to work creatively with ideas, emotions, and responses to climate change.
These guides make visible the work of curriculum making itself, demonstrating the depth required to move beyond myths to create climate change education of quality and substance.
Committing to curriculum making
Schools operate under constant pressure. Teachers and school leaders balance competing priorities, limited time, and high expectations. In that context, the myths surrounding climate change education offer reassurance: the sense that this work is already “in place” and can be delivered in a sequence of three or four lessons in one half-term. The cost of those myths accumulates quietly. It appears when children and young people sense urgency without understanding. When action is encouraged without the knowledge to support it. It also appears when schools invest energy in initiatives that feel worthwhile yet leave learning largely unchanged.
This work matters because it is not about adding more. It is about choosing carefully. As storms, flooding, and wildfires increasingly affect communities across the UK, the need for climate change education that builds real understanding becomes harder to ignore. A coherent curriculum replaces resources with purpose. It affirms that climate change education warrants the same care, quality, and attention as any other area of learning in a school. Moving from myth to coherent curriculum requires deliberate design. It means taking knowledge seriously, sequencing it carefully, and organising learning in ways children and young people can return to, build on, and trust.
CAPE’s curriculum guidance exists because children and young people deserve a beautiful, subject-specific curriculum that explores and examines climate change, one that helps them make sense of complexity and find their place in a changing world.
References
Department for Education. Curriculum and Assessment Review Building a world-class curriculum for all Final Report. (2025). [online] Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/690b96bbc22e4ed8b051854d/Curriculum_and_Assessment_Review_final_report_-_Building_a_world-class_curriculum_for_all.pdf. (Accessed: 29 January 2026).
Hoath, L. and Dave, H. (2024) Implementing Climate Change Education in Schools: Constructive Hope in Action. Climate Adapted Pathways for Education and Leeds Trinity University. [online] Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/63d81b6ab4c1ac76d7be2253/t/65b9749620f98c0b126a8296/1706652833869/CAPE+Report+2024-web_2.pdf. (Accessed: 29 January 2026).
Myatt, M. (2021). Beautiful Work. Mary Myatt Learning. [online] Available at: https://www.marymyatt.com/blog/beautiful-work. (Accessed: 29 January 2026).
Shaw, A. (2017). Climate change. Science. [online] Available at: https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/climate-change. (Accessed: 29 January 2026).
UNESCO. (2022). Youth demands for quality climate change education. [online] Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000383615. (Accessed: 29 January 2026).
