Citizenship education and climate injustice: Can schools bear the weight of a warming world?

16 September 2025

By Jaren Yeung, Citizenship PGCE

Reflections from a Citizenship student teacher

‘We must do something about the environment because we all live in this world!’ has been echoing along school halls ad nauseam since even my time as a student. At this point, sustainability is something we all know about, but few actually care. The UK Department for Education aims to become a leader in sustainability and climate education, and it has made a commitment for both teachers and students across multiple disciplines in the primary, secondary and tertiary level to bolster educational opportunities for sustainability. Yes, we have positioned our educational institutions as one of the chief interlocutors in climate justice but only symbolically. Over 80 thousand tonnes of food waste are produced by the education sector annually. Roughly 20% of a school’s energy is wasted, with the percentage rising to 30% on holidays and weekends. Paper, water and plastics are also wasted, producing more annual waste than a household does throughout its entire lifetime. How can we expect our students to care about sustainability if the institution teaching them to be sustainable is not?

Yet in the classroom, we are told the four Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle and repair. And while doing your part helps, a realisation creeps in: that your contribution to the cause, if not practiced by most, will not stop the threat of climate change and global warming, so why bother? If individual action does so little, it is much easier to be defeatist about the whole planet dying fiasco. In reality much of the onus is really on the government, corporations, and institutional leaders on top of our market hierarchy to follow those four Rs. They have the highest ability to change things around but ironically profit the most from climate change while being the least affected by its consequences. A double injustice we call that. And so, as citizens, as teachers and as students, we actually have a lot that we can do.

Citizenship is the subject of people and our relationship with each other in society. Officially becoming a part of the national curriculum in 2002, Citizenship began with the UK government recognising that its brand of democracy is fragile, dependent on a well-educated population with strong values for the betterment of their community (difficult thing to come by nowadays). Hence, the subject was the government’s solution to safeguarding a healthy community underpinned by shared values. At its core, it is the subject of social cohesion and development. Admittedly I hadn’t heard much about Citizenship before applying for the PGCE. My education career has been international from the start, so I was cautious with how the UK’s form of citizenship education reconciles itself within the context of its country—colonial past, liberalism, difficulties with multiculturalism and all. Turns out there is room for a global citizenship, especially evident for global issues such as climate change, and the academic and public discourses for citizenship education reflect that. Citizenship is key to equipping young people with the proactive attitude and the legal, political and media literacy to tackle the climate crisis through informed action.

However—despite government support—because it is still an infant subject within an already packed curriculum, schools have not incorporated Citizenship effectively. The subject remains unprioritised with under 18 percent of secondary schools across the country offering GCSE Citizenship Studies. Even in the schools that offer citizenship education, a lack of teacher training for the subject translates to limited subject specialists and teachers ill-equipped to navigate the knowledge and skills required to deliver meaningful lessons on it. It is a demanding subject that requires a lot of special attention, but because the scope of its aims is so large and so important, it is necessary for Citizenship as a discipline to bear this weight, but can schools?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: Young people across the UK and even around the world have made significant contributions to their communities. Take Teach The Future, a student-led initiative campaigning for “mandatory, integrated, solutions-centred climate education.” They accept volunteers from 14 to 26 and have undertaken extensive research to understand climate education, climate change policy, drafting legislation, writing to MPs and have even organised direct action events. In Manchester, Geography teacher Rachel Pickering along with six of her year 10 students conducted an audit of their school’s environmental practices which informed their recycling and litter campaigns. Year 6 students in another school in London, organised a competition pitting all classes against each other for which one can save the most amount of electricity. The important factor is that they are student-led projects, meaning young people are empowered to make the change they want to see. So, yes.

Again, the above were the examples or stories I have shed light on in my classroom. With a framework to understanding citizenship action against an abstract global issue, students avoid the pitfall of viewing sustainability as a lost cause. There are very tangible steps here, whether it be to volunteer with grassroots organisations, campaign against large corporations, develop sustainable practices for your school, the list goes on.

A little advice from someone who is relatively new to campaigning: just start. It is often most daunting in the beginning, but it really is very simple. Even my year 7s could draft a handwritten letter to their local MP “deploring (them) to seriously consider placing more recycling bins and invest in (their) borough’s waste management.”

I remember this one class in my second placement. My students and I explored the vast toolkit of activism through contemporary movements and community action. We examined the tactics activists used—protests, petitions, boycotts, lobbying—and debated their effectiveness in different contexts. The classroom became the space for their critical reflection: How can we succeed in making change? What are the risks, the limitations, and the unintended consequences of each method? With this foundation, my students worked collaboratively to design and plan their own citizenship actions. From drafting those persuasive letters to MPs about local environmental concerns to pitching to their student council on reducing food waste.

To see that all it took was two months, a series of eight lessons, twice every week, for an entire classroom of secondary students to become active citizens showed me that meaningful change doesn’t require years of experience or vast resources, just the right guidance, and a platform to act. It was a reminder that young people, when empowered with the tools of citizenship, can rise to the challenge and take ownership of the issues that matter to them.

Students are eager to learn about the world’s injustices and act. Stories can spark their curiosity and empathy. But even I must remember that knowledge alone isn’t enough. It’s up to us as educators to guide the next generation toward meaningful action. That’s where citizenship education shines, equipping students with the tools to channel that care into change.

Ultimately, they will inherit this world, and we are still living in it. If not us, then who will do right by our environment? We have not left the next generation a good enough place for them to flourish, the least we can do is fix it with them.

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Find out more about the Citizenship PGCE.