What a whirlwind the past academic year was. Thank you to all of the people who donated to our Big Give Christmas Challenge campaign and our Big Give Green Match Fund campaign last year. This programme was made possible with the help of our supporters and funders, including The Postcode Local Trust, the Reed Foundation, and the Armourers and Brasiers Gauntlet Trust. Without your support, we wouldn’t have been able to teach thousands of children about climate change. Here is a summary of our work over the last year during our Schools Climate Action Programme.
The Schools Climate Action Programme was our first ever year-long comprehensive learning plan for schools. We got 15 local schools involved, and we worked with each school five times over the course of the year. The idea for this was to ensure that students were able to understand the many complexities of climate change and how they can take action at their school through multiple differently-themed sessions. Each school was provided with a whole-school assembly with an introduction to climate change, a workshop about connecting to nature, a talk from a climate change and Arctic science expert, a workshop about climate change and sustainability, and a talk from an Arctic explorer. Teachers were also provided with a resource pack full of information on how to take action as a school (you can access this for free here) as well as three different teacher training sessions.
Over the year, we worked partly in-person and virtually with schools due to the ongoing pandemic and lockdowns. Through the programme, we worked with 3,237 primary pupils. We worked with one class or year group per school five times throughout the year, totalling 546 pupils. Therefore, over 500 pupils had a comprehensive understanding of climate change once the year was up.
The WWW team had a blast delivering these sessions. Each time we come into schools, we are always amazed at how knowledgeable primary pupils are about climate change. We were delighted to work with these 15 schools during the year. What we learned from this programme, was that 97% of primary students think that helping the planet is important, with the majority of students feeling less eco-anxiety than at the beginning of the session. Teachers gave us some great feedback throughout the programme:
“We really are enjoying the SCAP project! Such great work and so important for our children to learn about climate change!”
“I just wanted to say thank you so much for delivering the various workshops and sessions with the children over the past few months. I have had really positive feedback from the teachers and parents involved. It is so fantastic that organisations such as yours provide these opportunities because despite best efforts from teachers and schools it’s often hard to give sufficient time to these hugely important environmental issues alongside the other priorities in the National Curriculum – hopefully this will change in future!”
Most importantly, we asked pupils at the end of our programme: What will you pledge to do combat climate change? Here are some of our favourite answers…
“Walk when it is possible to. Climate change is a big problem and with big problems need big amounts of people to do things to help. If we all walk less there would be hundreds of times less problems to do with air quality.”
“Recycle more”
“Use less electricity”
“We can try to make bug hotels at school and plant more trees and flowers”
“I’m quite good at inventing so I don’t put things in the bin I make things out of it”
We’re very much looking forward to the next year of climate education in the South-West and hopefully providing a comprehensive programme such as this again next year. Get in touch with Rhianna at info@wickedweatherwatch.org.uk if you’d like some more information about the work we do!
