What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s an important question and one I knew the answer to at the age of 7; I absolutely wanted to be a vet. By the age of 10 I’d changed my mind and was definitely going to be a chef. A few years later it was back to animals as a zoologist but then a dissection of a piglet in biology turned my stomach, whilst the JIIG-CAL career software system suggested I was best suited to become a forensic scientist but overlooked the ticky box for ‘does the sight of blood make you queasy?’.
At no time in my education or career to date did I say ‘climate-anxious teacher’, yet I’m at the chalkface in a climate emergency wondering how on earth I got here.
Green Careers
I’ve been asked by the HT to arrange a KS3 event for Green Careers week in November. I’ve started to reach out to different local employers to see if they’ll come into school to talk to our students. You might think many young people want to be involved in finding solutions to our environmental challenges but, as a recent survey by the UCL Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education of over 3000 children aged 11-14 reported, only 17% of students stated that they would like to work in a job related to climate change and sustainability.
Its therefore vital schools provide opportunities to show young people how they can play an active role both in their personal lives and within the world of work as the future is going to be defined by the climate and nature crises.
When I asked 8P what they wanted to do when they were older, we had an array of responses including a striker for Newcastle United, the next Taylor Swift, Elon Musk v 2.0 and boisterous Pupil B who stated he wanted to be a brain surgeon which is very ambitious considering he is currently struggling to reach the ‘expected standard’ of progress for his age group.
Ambition
I never rebut or refute any aspirations as they might be achievable given hard work and dedication and I always provide support, stretch and challenge to ensure my students at least attempt to exceed expectations and reach their full potential.
But many of their desires as children may not be realised. Unless they are incredibly talented or, like Musk and Trump, come from wealthy families, many of the dreams of these amazing young people in the north east may be shattered by glass ceilings and a huge lack of social mobility.
Careers that benefit the environment
I’m sure representatives from business and industry will be able to enthuse our students on the delights of careers that benefit the environment even though the rates of pay may still be below par. Construction accounts for nearly 40% of global CO2 emissions and we need to design or retrofit our built environment to ensure it is climate resilient. We’ll require climate literate architects, civil and structural engineers and site workers. To make jobs attractive should we advertise positions in this field as “Fun with flood waters” or “Insulation is interesting”?
Roles in the renewable energy industry include electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and carbon accountants. As global temperatures warm, harvests decline and food insecurity increases, so careers in sustainable food production and permaculture will become more valued too. Then there are plenty of roles that focus on protecting the land and wildlife around us. A diverse array of forestry jobs is vital to manage our woodlands. They are also vital to increase the tree cover of the UK to 30% in the country’s largest environmental regeneration initiative. How can we encourage young people to say, I want to be an ‘arborist’, ‘sustainability assessor’, or ‘soil scientist’ when I’m older?
Working in these areas may not make you wealthy but they do increase well-being as you’re making a real difference. We spend a huge proportion of our life at work so job satisfaction should be a priority.
Essential Skills
Part of what’s lacking in education is building the skills students will need in the future. Anyone looking at our school system might think that the last government didn’t want our children to grow up to be creative thinkers, problem solvers or clear communicators. There is so much information teachers need to decant into their brains, training them to retrieve that knowledge and then regurgitate it onto the exam papers, that sometimes the skills development bit gets left behind in the ‘nice to have’ folder on the shared drive.
Life skills
Alongside those essential employability skills, we also seem to fail on life skills. Even my two offspring contact me on WhatsApp to say they are struggling with adulting. It’s as if we can educate children in school without actually ensuring they understand how to manage their finances (and debts if they go to university), wash clothes, get the best train tickets, fix a broken laptop. I’d like to think Hubster, and I had done quite a good job of parenting, but something has definitely gone wrong in terms of an education to prepare them for the future. Most of their hands-on skills seem to have been helping us on the smallholding or from Brownies and Scouts.
What’s worse is the planet is changing so fast that it’s almost impossible to know what we’re preparing them for. Kids entering reception this year could see a 4oC increase in global temperatures over the pre-industrial level. Lessons might inform young people that storms are becoming more frequent and severe or that the housing market in any coastal area is going to be an incredibly bad investment, but it doesn’t teach them how to repair anything, grow food or, heaven forbid, what to do when the internet goes down or the lights go off. Alongside a Green Careers event I think we should also have a ‘How to Adult in a Climate Emergency’ topic in our schemes of work and maybe teach some basic survival skills too like what to do in flood water.
Traditional skills
What I don’t see enough of in careers guidance is information on jobs involving traditional skills, ranging from blacksmithing and basketry to weaving and woodturning. These low technology roles are often overlooked but it is essential that we don’t let them die out as, given the potential for system collapse, we need people who can actually have hands-on skills to fix stuff.
If I look at the average age of drystone wallers in the area I’m sure they are not far off drawing their pension and finding a professional hedge layer is rarer than hen’s teeth. Yet dry stone walls and traditionally made hedges, with their different regional styles around the country, are incredibly valuable as they not only define boundaries but also mitigate water runoff, reduce soil erosion and provide a priceless haven for wildlife.
There are many reasons behind the loss of traditional skills including increased costs for materials and production compared to modern methods which then undercut local crafts. The dwindling interest means fewer people are learning and practising these techniques and insufficient support for training and preserving these skills. However, without recruiting the next generation of talented individuals we are at a high risk of losing these crafts altogether which would be catastrophic given our uncertain future.
Infiltration
I’m increasingly concerned by the involvement of the big oil industry in the education sector. BP, Equinor and Shell all provide materials and initiatives into schools. Last year at a STEM careers event I got into a slightly heated discussion with the team on the BP stand whilst my students gathered up the freebie pencils and post-it’s.
The enthusiastic representatives stated that the oil industry was absolutely essential in the transition to Net Zero and that they were growing their investment in renewables. Wonder what they think of the organisation now that they have announced they will dilute their decarbonisation targets as the global retreat from green standards gathers pace.
The oil industry
If it was up to me (it isn’t) I’d ban any involvement in the oil industry in the education of young people as any attempts at greenwashing doesn’t make them less insidious. Apparently, many of the polluting organisations are struggling to get the brightest and best graduates to work for them, but they just keep upping the starting salaries so that some will swallow the bitter pill and take the bite. Given that almost everything we do costs something, how can we educate young people that money is the root of the problems humanity now faces and that sustainable happiness isn’t really possible with the current socio-political and financial systems? Answers on a piece of recycled paper please!
Note to self: As the government’s perpetual calls for growth are ringing in my ears it is time to write to my new MP again. There’s a simple fact the government needs to understand, one which I share with my students: there can’t be infinite growth on a finite planet. If it were up to me, I’d be putting a whole load of additional red tape around the Earth’s life support systems.
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