Education for a planet in crisis: does the Curriculum Review get it right?

Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fronteres_planet%C3%A0ries_al_llarg_del_temps_(2009-2023).png

This is the second installment of my blog series on the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review. You can read the rest HERE. In this brief blog, focus on the report's stated ambition to build a 'world class curriculum' which 'reflects our society'.

An Inclusive Curriculum?
One of the most interesting parts of this review is the inclusion of a commentary on the need for diversity within the curriculum. This is quite deep within the text (page 32) and is probably the element which most challenges the curricula status quo. It is really encouraging to see the commitment to ensuring all young people are represented through curriculum and that they should encounter ‘a wide range of perspectives that broaden their horizons’ (p32). It was especially good to hear the student voice coming through strongly here. The authors noted that pupils made ‘compelling arguments…that the curriculum needs to reflect society, support equality of opportunity, and challenge discrimination’ (p33). Again, the fact that this element is coming through so strongly highlights the failure of the paradigm of the previous curriculum reforms to deliver on these aims. 
 
It is hard however to be optimistic about the opportunity for reform when calls for more inclusive curricula go back decades. Nick Dennis for instance has highlighted the important work of educational activists such as Bernard Coard and Nana Bonsu, who were instrumental in the ‘Supplementary Schools’ movement; as well as numerous government reports (e.g. Rampton (1981), Swann (1985), McPherson (1999) etc.) which have focused on the importance of a diverse and inclusive curriculum. It is also notable that there is no recognition of the calls for decolonisation, nor the work which has been done to decolonise curriculum. The authors state that ‘mutual access to core knowledge, and curriculum coherence, efficacy and breadth for all children should remain central as we work to ensure the curriculum is more broadly representative’ (p33). But simply adding more stories into the curriculum is not the same as a truly inclusive curriculum. This treats curriculum as content choices only, ignoring its wider ontological, pedagogical, ethical and affective dimensions, and running counter to almost all theoretical work on curriculum. Inclusive curricula consider not only the curriculum content but the purposes of teaching, the pedagogies employed, and the agency enabled through teaching. Because the review is so wedded to the ‘knowledge-rich’ and ‘mastery’ approaches, it is hard to see how these aspects of inclusivity can be pursued at all.  
 
It is also notable that the phrase ‘a curriculum that reflects our society’, by definition, raises questions about what constitutes ‘our’ society, as well as encompassing the challenges society is facing. The report itself notes that children in Britain, and by extension the wider world, are facing an environmental crisis, ‘A curriculum that reflects our society’ therefore needs to tackle these aspects as well. Dale Banham has spoken many times about the importance of the curriculum acting not just as a mirror, reflecting our society back to us, but as a light to illuminate paths forwards. A curriculum should enable young people to reflect on societal (and global) directions, ethics and values with a view to shining a light on future paths. This kind of work has never been more important.  
 
Yet the solutions remain stubbornly unambitious partly due to their attachment- and unwillingness- to challenge the ‘knowledge-rich’ approaches and pedagogies laid down in  the last ten years. There is little evidence that the ‘powerful knowledge’ turn in schools has in fact allowed young people to ‘engage more effectively with issues affecting them and the world around them’ (p34). Rather, there is good evidence that the ‘powerful knowledge’ approach, as interpreted in the National Curriculum set by the last government, led to increasingly narrow curricula, especially in History, and actively blocked pupils from understanding global forces such as colonialism by making the subject taboo in schools.  ​

A World-Class Curriculum with no Planetary Perspectives 
The report also suggests that ‘it is crucial that young people benefit from an understanding of the climate crisis’s causes, consequences and possible solutions’ (p40) and that ‘subject-specific knowledge remains the best investment in preparing young people for these challenges and opportunities’ (p34). The lack of citations here is quite notable! In almost the same breath we are also told that pupils will need this knowledge so that they have ‘the necessary knowledge and skills to thrive in tomorrow’s industries and tackle the serious challenges facing our planet’ (p40). This is a set of outcomes rooted firmly in the idea that 'sustainability education' can be a means for continued economic growth. Such an analysis seems to sit a decade or more behind the current consensus on the planetary crisis we are facing. In his 2021 book, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, Bruno Latour makes the case (supported by a significant scientific consensus) that the concept of sustainability and the maintenance of extractive late-stage capitalism have long since become non-options for future directions. His claim is that the planet is already beyond the point of total transformation. Humans have altered the Earth to such an extent, he argues, that we have left its surface altogether, the world has changed in our absence, and that our current challenge is to work out how we land again safely on this new Earth. Such a challenge requires education to, as Martin Gren put it at a recent conference, lift its gaze beyond societal concerns and consider questions which relate to what sort of planet we can and want to live on, through and with. Gren’s call is for traditional disciplines to consider how they collectively might contribute to the reimagining needed survive on a new Earth.  
 
In this context, the continued failure to recognise the importance of challenging existing modes of thinking about the planet means opportunities for meaningful change are lost. Whilst the concepts of 'climate change' and 'sustainability' appear numerous times in the report, the intertwining issues of colonialism and planetary collapse are not highlighted at all. Instead, issues of climate and sustainability are framed in narrow, nationalistic ways, with an emphasis on enabling economic advancement. There is a call to ‘maximise young people’s opportunities’ and prepare them for ‘the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and trends in digital information’ (p10) with its demands for ‘media literacy and critical thinking’ (p10). The solution proposed is to leverage sustainability education as a means to find children future work in economic fields connected with AI, digital information, media, and so on. The inherent contradictions in pursuing both of these aims are also ignored. Many of these industries are actively contributing to the crisis in our planetary system – not least AI. Of course, addressing global issues does not preclude the study of traditional subjects, but it does raise real questions about whether the content and core concepts of the traditional subjects (especially in isolation) are sufficient. To come back again to Latour’s framing, every discipline needs to become a geo-discipline which has a concern with the planetary Earth. 
 
It is also notable that this lack of engagement with the planetary is reflected in the review of the Geography curriculum itself, which is deemed as 'fit for purpose', and requiring  only ‘light-touch attention' (p82). Any reference to the need for a focus on planetary issues is subsumed under the somewhat inadequate heading of ‘green skills’ and the recommendation to focus on climate and sustainability education. The latter has already been noted as an inadequate response to the planetary crisis by many experts in the field, and I am convinced will have been raised by professional bodies, teachers, parents, pupils and scholars who contributed to the review process. Indeed, Martin Gren's 2021 article 'Climate Emergency - Another Mayday Letter from the Earth' makes an impassioned plea for Geographers to take the planetary dimensions of the current crisis seriously.

Similar is also true in the Science curriculum. Although there are more mentions of the climate in the notes for Science reform, the imperative is linked to ‘supporting the wider economy, with the growth of the green economy’ (p115) and is building from a previous curriculum iteration which made only limited reference to climate Science. There is also a continued focus on the concept of sustainability here too, despite calls for the concept to be left behind. It is notable that sustainability education has been a major focus in many European countries and is now beginning to be abandoned. By contrast, England is only just beginning to engage with an already defunct conceptual framing.
 
The fact that the global perspective is so absent from the reform of Science and Geography reveals already that the chances of meaningful shifts towards more global focuses across the curriculum, as suggested by Latour, will almost certainly not happen. If the planetary lens is not central to curriculum then whether or not teachers engage with it will be entirely dependent on the interests of individuals.  Curriculum specification could lead to significant investment in planetary-scale teaching, but the opportunity is squandered. The absence of the planetary leaves us on the edge of a lost decade in education when it comes to educating children meaningfully for the Anthropocene.

Thanks so much for reading. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments over at (@apf102.bsky.social) — Bluesky You can return to the main blog HERE.​