To save you the trouble of all that searching, here’s what the Lib Dems election manifesto has to say about education, and about environmental / climate / sustainability / global / etc education – see text in bold.
Liberal Democrats believe that education is the best investment we can make in our children’s potential and our country’s future. The Conservatives have consistently let down children and parents and neglected schools and colleges. They have failed to grasp the scale of the damage that the Covid pandemic has done to children’s learning and mental health. We will invest in education, starting in the crucial early years and continuing throughout adulthood. We want every child to get the support and attention they need at school, so they leave with the skills, confidence and resilience to be happy and successful – whatever they choose to do next.
We will:
- Put a dedicated, qualified mental health professional in every primary and secondary school, making sure all children and parents have someone they can turn to for help, funded by increasing the Digital Services Tax on social media firms and other tech giants.
- Increase school and college funding per pupil above the rate of inflation every year, and end the scandal of crumbling school and college buildings by investing in new buildings and clearing the backlog of repairs.
- Introduce a ‘Tutoring Guarantee’ for every disadvantaged pupil who needs extra support.
- Invest in high-quality early years education and close the attainment gap by giving disadvantaged children aged three and four an extra five free hours a week and tripling the Early Years Pupil Premium to £1,000 a year.
- Reinstate maintenance grants for disadvantaged students immediately to make sure that living costs are not a barrier to studying at university.
- Create new Lifelong Skills Grants, giving all adults £5,000 to spend on education and training throughout their lives, and aim to increase them to £10,000 in the future when the public finances allow.
In more detail: we will:
- Tackle the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention by:
- Creating a teacher workforce strategy to ensure that every secondary school child is taught by a specialist teacher in their subject.
- Reforming the School Teachers’ Review Body to make it properly independent of government and able to recommend fair pay rises for teachers, and fully funding those rises every year.
- Funding teacher training properly so that all trainee posts in school are paid.
- Introducing a clear and properly funded programme of high-quality professional development for all teachers, including training on effective parental engagement.
- Urgently establish a standing commission to build a long-term consensus across parties and teachers to broaden the curriculum and make qualifications at 16 and 18 fit for the 21st century. This will draw on best practice such as the International Baccalaureate and ensure children learn core skills such as critical thinking, verbal reasoning and creativity.
- Improve the quality of vocational education, including skills for entrepreneurship and self-employment.
- Strengthen careers advice and links with employers in schools and colleges.
- Include arts subjects in the English Baccalaureate and give power to Ofsted to monitor the curriculum so that schools continue to provide a rich curriculum including subjects like art, music or drama.
- Expand provision of extracurricular activities, such as sport, music, drama, debating and coding, starting with a new free entitlement for disadvantaged children.
- Reform Ofsted inspections and end single-word judgements so that parents get a clear picture of the true strengths and weaknesses of each school, and schools get the guidance and support they need to improve.
- Implement a new parental engagement strategy, including a regular, published parent survey and guidance for schools on providing accessible information to parents on what their children are learning.
- Tackle persistent absence by setting up a register of children who are not in school, and working to understand and remove underlying barriers to attendance.
- Tackle the crisis in special educational needs provision, and help to end the postcode lottery in provision, by:
- Giving local authorities extra funding to reduce the amount that schools pay towards the cost of a child’s Education, Health and Care Plan.
- Establishing a new National Body for SEND to fund support for children with very high needs.
- Give local authorities with responsibility for education the powers and resources to act as Strategic Education Authorities for their area, including responsibility for places planning, exclusions, administering admissions including in-year admissions, and SEND functions.
- Redirect capital funding for unnecessary new free schools to help clear the backlog of school repairs.
- Tackle bullying in schools by promoting pastoral leadership in schools and delivering high-quality relationships and sex education.
- When the public finances allow, give disadvantaged two-year-olds an extra five free hours of early years education a week, as another step towards a universal, full-time entitlement for all two- to four-year-olds.
- Introduce a Young People’s Premium, extending Pupil Premium funding to disadvantaged young people aged 16-18.
- Review further education funding, including the option of exempting colleges from VAT.
- Support the education of children in care, extend Pupil Premium Plus funding to children in kinship care, and guarantee any child taken into care a school place within three weeks, if required to move schools.
- Safeguard the future of our world-leading universities and the wellbeing of every student by:
- Supporting science, research and innovation in universities, including continuing to participate in Horizon Europe and joining the European Innovation Council, as set out in chapter 4.
- Giving higher education institutions a statutory duty of care for their students.
- Introducing a statutory Student Mental Health Charter and requiring universities to make mental health services accessible to their students.
- Returning to the Erasmus Plus programme as an associated country, as set out in chapter 9.
- Establishing a review of higher education finance in the next Parliament to consider any necessary reforms in the light of the latest evidence of the impact of the existing financing system on access, participation and quality, and make sure there are no more retrospective raising of rates or selling-off of loans to private companies.
- Reporting international student flows separately to estimates of long-term migration.
- Ensuring that all universities work to widen participation by disadvantaged and underrepresented groups across the sector, prioritising their work with students in schools and colleges, and requiring every university to be transparent about selection criteria.
- Investing in education and training to equip people with the skills needed for the low-carbon economy of the future, as set out in chapters 4 and 8.