Art and Climate Change

Kate Parker writes in the TES about how primary schools have worked with the Eden Project on an art project to bring climate change to life.   This is how the article begins: The art project opening pupils’ eyes to climate change “Climate change can be a difficult concept for primary pupils to grasp – but one art project…

June 24th Report

Children from the Robert Ferguson primary school in Carlisle have produced a video explaining climate change and challenging adults to do more about it.  You can see it here on YouTube. . A recent report in Nature Geoscience shows that most water cycle diagrams used in schools are completely out of date.  In an analysis of over 450…

Costing the Earth

The following data are taken from a presentation made by Alan Reid, editor of Environmental Education Research, in April. A Nature Conservancy enquiry report, presented at the 1965 Keele Conference, stated that funds being spent on research into the education of all our future citizens equalled the amount devoted to research on glue. Sean Carson said that in the 1970s the UK’s…

June 17th Report

NAEE, the Savers charity, and Heart of England Rotary invite you to the launch of the Cut Down on Plastics exhibition of children’s work at Holy Trinity Church, Broadgate, Coventry on Friday 28th June at 1030.  Councillor Linda Bigham, the Lord Mayor of Coventry, will launch the exhibition.  RSVP to gabrielle@back.f9.co.uk . The Great Science Share for Schools allows children to communicate something that…

St Matthew’s Primary School visits Birmingham Botanical Gardens

This is an account of the visit in December by a Year 6 group from St Matthew’s C of E Primary School to Birmingham Botanical Gardens & Glasshouses as part of NAEE’s Hugh Kenrick Days bursary scheme.  It’s written by Foundation Subjects Leader Mr T. Etheridge. As part of their Geography work, Year 6 at St Matthew’s CofE Primary School, Nechells, Birmingham,…

Is Learning for Turning?

As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Stephen Sterling has a new website, and on this you’ll find his new blog.  We draw this to your attention because we think it will be something to watch as it develops over time.  It might even be his main mode of communication from now on. Today,…

June 10th Report

“From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning.  From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge.  And from the mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence.” This quote by E.O. Wilson headed a recent message to NAAEE members and supporters from NAAEE CEO (and NAEE…

Ofsted’s new inspection framework

Along with others interested in environment and sustainability, NAEE responded to Ofsted’s call for comments on its draft Inspection Framework.  This was our response, and others can be seen here. Ofsted says: “The proposals generated a significant amount of interest.  In total, we received more than 15,000 responses to the consultation.  This included almost 11,000…

June 3rd Report

The Education in England (the history of our schools) website contains HMI publications including the (1979) second edition of its Curriculum 11-16 Working Papers which deals with environmental education.  This was a time when HMI took it seriously, unlike Ofsted today.  But then, HMI thought seriously about curriculum, as did a lot of other groups – unlike today…