Election Update – NAEE has looked at what, if anything, the party manifestoes have to say about education and environmental education. You’ll find them here: Lib Dems – Labour – Conservative – Green – Reform UK – SNP – Scottish Labour – Scottish Greens and Plaid Cymru.
Teach the Future has analysed some of the party manifestoes to see where they stand on climate education and the need to rebuild and retrofit schools. You can visit their Instagram page for posts on each party, showing what they have promised and what Teach the Future thinks that they have missed.
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has published an analysis of the plans for education set out in the manifestos of the main political parties in England.
The Confederation of School Trusts and the National Governance Association have summaries of the manifesto pledges relating to education from the Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties.
The latest Inkcap journal has a special focus on what the party manifestos have to say about nature and the environment. You can subscribe now and receive a digest every week.
BBC Radio 4’s Rare Earth programme explored what the manifestoes had to say about the environment. It’s on BBC Sounds.
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Big Brum Event – The 2024 session of the Standing Conference on the Arts, Education and the Environment will take place on Friday 26th July at The STEAMhouse in Birmingham. NAEE is a partner in the event and has published a blog giving a brief account of last July’s standing conference session. Please do let Ben Ballin know if you would like to attend: ben@bigbrum.org.uk
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School Environment Programmes – A Masters student at Imperial College is currently conducting research on environmental programmes in UK primary schools. The research involves a short survey that aims to assess teachers’ perspectives on these initiatives and the factors that facilitate or impede programme adoption. The data collected will help promote environmental education while also ensuring adequate support for teachers. The survey is anonymous and is open to all primary school teachers and teacher assistants in the UK. If you are interested in participating, you can access the survey by following this link.
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SoS UK Update – The 7th annual SDG Teach In saw nearly 1100 educators embed sustainability in their teaching throughout March 2024. You can find out about the impact in SopS’s 2024 campaign report.
The Responsible Futures Impact Report highlights the programme’s key achievement’s from the past decade, including increased whole-institution approaches for embedding sustainability in learning.
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Good Education in a Fragile World – A new seminar series is launched based on the recently published book: Good Education in Fragile World: The Value of a Collaborative and Contextualised Approach to Sustainability in Higher Education. The seminar will unpack some of the tensions that emerge when answering the question: What kind of education is needed to restore the health and wellbeing of the planet and ourselves now and for generations to come? It is online between 13:00 – 14:00 on Thursday 18th July with a focus on Education as if the world matters. It questions past educational philosophy and structures to imagine a more ‘truthful’ and agentic ‘good education’. You can register here.
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Global Challenges – The theme of the 2024 TEESNet conference is re-centring justice and exploring educational responses to global challenge. TEESNet is now inviting proposals for contributions related to research, practice, and creative provocations that align with this theme. The submission deadline is July 31st
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Schools Outdoors – Research, by Dr Chris Mackie: Early childhood-nature relations in Scottish school-based outdoor learning, investigated how children and teachers in Scotland come to know the outdoor environments in which they are learning. Mackie identified potential pathways and barriers to Learning for Sustainability that emerge during school-based outdoor learning.
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New from MECCE – The MECCE Project recently co-published a policy paper with the Global Education Monitoring Report and UNESCO, exploring interrelationships between education and the SDGs, and proposing a new framework for a global indicator of ‘greening education’. You can read the report here.
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A Tool on whose Terms? – We are halfway to the deadline for the 2030 SGD education targets, and the 2024 edition of the recent Global Education Monitoring Report Technology on her terms warns that exposure to algorithm-driven, image-based content is a risk for girls.
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Designing Quality – A report by the Care Inspectorate, Scottish Futures Trust and the Scottish Government: Space to Grow and Thrive: Design guidance for early learning and childcare and school age childcare settings aims to support current and potential providers, planners and architects in the delivery of high-quality physical environments for children attending early learning and school aged childcare in Scotland.
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Northern Lights – Ian Whittaker, a Senior Lecturer in Physics at Nottingham Trent University explores what’s going on in the sun to generate the recent widely-seen auroras. Click here for his The Conversation article.
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Dragonfly Adventures – Next week 6th to 14th July is Dragonfly Week and the British Dragonfly Society has a number of events across the UK including a celebration of three Dragonfly Hotspots: See more on Facebook about Wicken Fen Nature Reserve, RSPB Newport Wetlands and Magor Marsh Nature Reserve, and RSPB Conwy. You can report findings at #dragonflyweek.
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Good bye to Polio? – Our World in Data has an article on the painstaking efforts to eradicate the polio virus that used to paralyze hundreds of thousands of people each year. In 2023, there were only 6 cases reported in Afghanistan and 6 in Pakistan, the only countries where the wild virus is still found..
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Carbon and Meat – An article in Our World in Data says that eating meat with a lower carbon footprint often means killing more animals and treating them more poorly. It’s tempting to assume that what’s good for the planet is also good for the animal, but unfortunately, this is not the case. These two goals are often in conflict. What’s better for animal welfare is often worse for the environment, and vice versa. This is true across different types of livestock (for example, beef versus chicken) and across different ways of raising a specific animal (caged versus free-range hens).