Sheffield Hallam University has partnered with Global Action Plan to deliver the ‘Good Life Schools’, a free programme for secondary schools and colleges, that brings communities together to create ways of living and learning together that are good for us, and good for the planet.
The programme has been running in 3 Sheffield secondaries this academic year (Meadowhead School, King Egberts School and High Storrs School), and have an additional 7 secondary school places for the 2025-26 academic year, available on a first come first served basis.
Join our supported Good Life Schools programme and receive:
CPD, launch assembly and workshop delivery from the local officer
Step-by-step guidance and a pack of teaching resources and activities to support your school run the programmeup to an entire academic year.
Ongoing support from your Community Engagement Lead.
Funding of up to £2,000 to help you deliver the project
How it works
Your school will be supported by an experienced Community Engagement Lead, who will work alongside a Lead Teacher in your school to deliver the programme as an extra-curricular opportunity during a term and time of your choice.
Form a Good Life Group, explore the Good Life vs. the Goods Life
Create a Good Life project, gather support for your projects
Put your Good Life projects into action, celebrate and share your story
Please see below for more information or visit Good Life Schools. There is a short online information session taking place on Wednesday 30 April at 3.30-4.00pm featuring colleagues from GAP, SHU and at least one school running the programme this year. To sign up please use this link.
In the meantime if you have any question please email Lee Jowett (Sheffield Hallam University) or Sian Buckley (Global Action Plan).
Elena Clark – Another Way – An introduction to Another Way and about our schools work with Power of 10 (15 mins) – Slides
Lauren Mysiw & Kayla Thompson – Sheffield Family Hubs/Breastfeeding in Sheffield – Promotion of the Infant Feeding team educational offer and signing up to the Breastfeeding in Sheffield ‘Breastfeeding Friendly Award’ for public spaces and employers (15 mins) – Slides
Sian Buckley – Global Action Plan – information and promotion about the Good Life Schools programme currently being delivered and recruiting for 2025/26 in Sheffield (15 mins) – Slides
John Bray- Discovery Outdoors– Learning outdoors and connecting with nature and green spaces in Sheffield (15 mins) – Slides
Sasha Beswick- Barnsley College – 2030 SDG game and other activities/opportunity (5 mins) (no slides)
Michala Sullivan – National Energy Agency – fully funded workshops for KS3 – KS5 (5 mins) –Slides
If you would like a link to the TeachMeet, please complete this short eForm. A calendar invite will be sent nearer the time, so please block out in your calendar.
For researchers: work with a primary school in South Yorkshire to investigate an age-appropriate theme of climate change and sustainability
For information for schools, please see the schools’ page.
Audience: Researchers and Lecturers (including PhD students) in Sheffield Hallam University and University of Sheffield who have an interest in climate change and sustainability
Research topics: Air quality, energy generation, energy efficiency, flood management and biodiversity (you do not need to be an expert in any of these topics to participate)
Programme outline
February-March 2025
CPD researcher training – 1-hour online training and 2-hour virtual workshop (delivered by the Climate Ambassadors programme)
CPD with your allocated teacher – 1 day face to face training and planning at Sheffield Hallam University
April-July 2025 (dates to be agreed between pair)
3 in school activities with your teacher partner/students (up to 2 hours)
2 virtual activities with your teacher partner/students (up to an hour)
Ongoing support, as required from a mentor at SHU
Autumn 2025
Information session to apply for further funding
Researcher commitments
Researcher to attend online and face to face training sessions
Participate in 5 activities with their teacher partner
Meet with a mentor mid-programme
Engage with surveys and evaluation of the programme
Researchers will be asked to select preferred training dates and a preferred research topic on signing up.
Researchers will be able to claim up £75 for travel expenses, however we are unable to fund academic time. You will need to sign up to become a Climate Ambassador and complete a DBS check.
Further funding is available to apply for a Partnership Grant from the Royal Society once you have completed this programme.
For schools: Work with your students and a researcher from Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) or the University of Sheffield to investigate an age-appropriate theme of climate change and sustainability
Audience: Primary school teachers (including infant and junior schools) in South Yorkshire
Research topics: Air quality, energy generation, energy efficiency, flood management and biodiversity
Programme outline
February-March 2025
April-July 2025 (dates to be agreed between pair)
3 in school activities with your researcher and students (up to 2 hours)
2 virtual activities with your researcher and students (up to an hour)
Ongoing support, as required from a mentor at SHU
CPD teacher training – 2-hour virtual twilight workshop
CPD with your allocated researcher – 1 day face to face training and planning at Sheffield Hallam University
Autumn 2025
Information session to apply for further funding
School commitments
A member of staff to attend twilight and training session
Participate in 5 activities with their class and researcher
Meet with a mentor mid-programme
Engage with surveys and evaluation of the programme
School staff will be asked to select preferred training dates and research topic. We will endeavour to match you with a researcher interested in the same research topic.
Schools will receive £300 to cover supply costs as well as project equipment loan. Researchers will be trained on how to work with schools (via the Climate Ambassadors) and will hold a valid DBS.
Further funding is available to apply for a Partnership Grant from the Royal Society once you have completed this programme.
If you are an organisation interested in attending, please complete the separate eForm.
Audience: Schools leaders: Trustees, Governors, CEOs and Trust Leaders, Heads and Deputy Heads, Early Years Setting Leads, Curriculum Leaders and Assistant Heads, Business Managers & Eco-Leads. We actively encourage Eco-Leads to attend with a school or trust leader.
Phase settings: Early Years Settings, Schools, Colleges and Trusts
This one-day conference will support education settings, schools and trust leaders to understand the benefits of a sustainability leadership and climate action plans, support to develop a plan and identify opportunities to support their settings in taking action on climate change, sustainability and biodiversity.
Keynotes: Seniors Leaders from education settings and trusts in South Yorkshire and wider region.
Workshops: Strategic support from the Department for Education funded programmes ‘National Education Nature Park’ and ‘Climate Ambassadors’, Let’s Go Zero, Eco-Schools England and Academic Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University.
Opportunities to network, make connections and speak to colleagues and organisation
By the end of the day, leaders will have:
Considered opportunities for climate action plans and considered how sustainability leadership could be structured in their setting
Started to develop an action plan for their setting and understand how to calculate their setting’s carbon footprint
Been signposted to organisations that can support them with developing climate action plans further
Identified barriers and how they could overcome them
Identified funding opportunities
Sign up today, deadline for signing up Friday 21 February 2025.
If you are an organisation interested in attending, please complete the separate eForm.
By Lee Jowett Climate Change and Sustainability Research Fellow Sheffield Institute of Education
In July, the new Labour government announced a review of the national curriculum. Two of its stated aims are to ‘ensure children and young people leave compulsory education ready for life and ready for work’, and to ‘reflect the issues … of our society.’
Today is the last day for submitting evidence which I am currently in the process of doing myself, my usual tact of leaving things to the last minute!
If the review is to succeed in these aims, it cannot ignore climate change — arguably the defining issue of our age, and certainly key to many jobs of the future as the UK moves towards net zero.
Over the last year, I have been interviewing senior leaders and teachers in primary schools, secondary schools, further education colleges and local authorities to find out how climate change is currently taught. I have discovered a lot of great work, instigated by passionate staff members.
But in all of my conversations, one thing was clear — for climate change to be given the time and attention it requires, it must be embedded in the curriculum.
The current situation — an inconsistent picture
The Department for Education brought out a climate change strategy in 2021, but crucially it wasn’t mandatory. This has meant that — with so many competing priorities and all the demands of the mandatory elements of the curriculum — many schools are only dimly aware of it.
Of course, schools and their staff recognise climate change as one of the most important challenges facing our species, and therefore they want to teach it to our children. But this is happening almost despite government policy, rather than because of it.
One headteacher told me, ‘The whole curriculum needs a massive overhaul, and schools shouldn’t be so outcome-driven. Climate change is as important as reading and maths. There’s no point in being able to read, write or do the times tables if we’re all living off rubbish heaps.’
In all of my conversations with educators, nearly every one of them has singled out a lack of time and space in the curriculum as a key barrier to teaching climate change.
It means current efforts at climate education are piecemeal and inconsistent, largely driven by the heroic efforts of individual members of staff rather than an overarching strategy. There are great initiatives happening, but whether your child will get to experience them currently depends entirely on where they go to school.
Interestingly, in the further education colleges I spoke to, sustainability was much more embedded in the curriculum. This is because these institutions tend to collaborate with employers, who need college leavers with these skills.
But the college staff I spoke to said that students were coming to them with a lack of awareness, because it’s not taught to the same level in primary and secondary schools.
Learning from success stories
The good news is that in all of the schools I spoke to, there was excellent work happening around sustainability and climate education.
From the Tiny Forests and Edible Playgrounds projects which help schools make the most of their outdoor space, to the Eco–Schools scheme for schools, children and young people across the country are taking part in practical, solution-focused climate programmes.
Alongside these national schemes, I found that local authorities can make a huge difference. Leicester City Council are the shining example. Their Sustainable Schools team provides free support to all Leicester schools, focusing on carbon reduction and increasing biodiversity on school grounds.
They also run a huge number of projects that schools can take part in, including Less Litter for Leicester, the Mealbarrow food-growing competition, and Sustainable Drainage Systems for Schools. As a result of all this work, Leicester has the highest number of Eco-Schools Green Flag Awards of any unitary authority in England.
So what can we learn from the best examples of schools teaching climate change and sustainability well? From my conversations, two things stand out as crucial to these success stories.
The first must-have is a passionate sustainability lead with the remit to oversee climate education across the whole school. Sometimes this is a teacher, sometimes a group of teachers, and occasionally it’s part of a wider leadership role. One eco-lead told me, ‘You need to have someone who’s willing to really champion it, to make it easier for the rest of the staff to engage in the projects.’
The second is senior leadership who recognise the importance of climate education and give it the time and institutional backing needed. Without this, climate change risks being lost among other priorities.
One college leader told me, ‘It is successful at our college because everybody from the board down has bought into it. When I’m speaking to colleagues from other settings, sometimes they haven’t got that whole organisational buy-in. They’re always battling against it because although it’s a good idea, it’s seen as an add-on.’
What needs to be done
The current climate change strategy needs to be strengthened. It talks a lot about buildings and procurement, but not so much about teaching and learning. The curriculum and assessment review is an opportunity to change this, and provide the political will to truly embed climate education in our schools.
Again and again in my interviews, teachers said they didn’t have time to focus on climate. This could be resolved by slimming down the overall curriculum. Teachers also need time to be trained in climate education and sustainability, so they have the confidence to deliver it.
Finally, climate education must be made a mandatory part of the curriculum. Having a sustainability lead in each school would mean it is embedded in all decision-making, in a similar way to safeguarding. This is already happening in the best examples I spoke to, but it needs to be rolled out nationally. Having attended one of the live events in Doncaster yesterday, I was encouraged to hear colleagues asking for climate change and sustainability to be part of the national curriculum. Becky Francis herself reflected on climate change and sustainability being a theme across many of the events.
Climate change should become a golden thread that runs throughout the curriculum. It’s what the teachers I have spoken to want. And it’s what our children and young people deserve.
Lee Jowett is a Climate Change and Sustainability Research Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University. Previously he worked for a local authority and has been a secondary school science teacher. He can be contacted on l.jowett@shu.ac.uk
Bridget Bircumshaw is a teaching and quality lead at Chesterfield College. We spoke to her about how they are embedding green skills into the curriculum at every level.
Can you give some background on your college?
We have about 6,000 students, mainly 16 to 18 year olds, plus 1,800 apprentices, 300 higher education students, 300 for adult provision and 560 members of staff.
What’s your role and what responsibilities do you have for climate change and sustainability?
I am a teaching and learning quality lead across the whole college, looking at quality improvement and assurance. I am also a teacher trainer. It’s my role to really drive green skills. It was something we wanted to bring in for development but it didn’t initially fit under my job description. It does now.
When Covid hit we had to get online really quickly, and we realised that as a sustainable educational system, digital enterprise was something that we needed to look at. So that was almost the seed that started where we were going to go.
Why is sustainability important to you and your college?
We don’t call it sustainability, we call it green skills. Further education is all about skills. Sustainability tends to be thought of as about recycling and litter, and it can prevent people thinking about the wider picture. So we’ve rebranded it as green skills, and that’s what goes into our curriculum. It’s what we talk to employers about when we work with them on the curriculum and how our students develop their wider skills.
Have you had any training around sustainability or climate education?
What activities have you undertaken at your college?
The first thing we did was set up a panel including people from across the college, from the CEO down. We meet regularly to work out how we’re going to follow the DfE road map.
Then we turned one of our regular inset days into a sustainability day where staff and students all came in and learned from each other. We based it on the UNESCO seventeen global goals and we linked each of the goals to an area. By the end of the day everyone had an awareness of what climate justice is about. The following year we focused on wellbeing and life skills through the green skills lens. Our third year will concentrate on personal development and volunteering to support self and communities.
In our curriculum, we have added green skills as one of the key pieces of the jigsaw. Childcare students learn about forest schools, and as part of that they made a hedgehog-friendly campus. When they did their placements, they took that learning to their nurseries or education centres. Our plumbing students did grey water harvesting, building a tank which collected rainwater that can be used to flush toilets.
Green skills are no longer something that stands outside the curriculum, it’s embedded throughout our curriculum. And it trickles down throughout the college. In hairdressing and beauty, we look at the products that we use. In catering, they only buy from a 20-mile radius now, cutting down on transport costs.
What barriers have you faced?
For staff, it’s time. ‘How am I going to do this? I haven’t got the skills to do that. I’m a brickie. I’m a hairdresser.’ We had to simplify it, strip it right back. It’s awareness you need, you don’t need a master’s degree in it.
Our tutors are vocational specialists. Instead of observing and grading them, we’re giving them back their professionalism — saying, ‘You are the professional in this area, so show us what you want to do in a practical way. How will this support our learners?’
Working with employers and having their input into developing our curricula is highly important. Green skills are needed in so many different sectors. Students want to hear it from the horse’s mouth before you teach it to them.
Do you think what you’ve done could be replicated in other FE institutions?
It is successful at our college because everybody from the board down has bought into it. It is a strategic strand. When attending events with other FE institutions, I notice that there are often hubs of people doing things but they haven’t got that whole organisational buy-in. So they’re always battling against it because although it’s a good idea, it’s seen as an add-on.
In the colleges where it is working, they all have very high-up buy-in. It’s brought up all the time at board meetings. It’s more and more important. From next year, we’ll need to show data showing that we are decarbonising the curriculum and the impact this has on teaching and learning assessment for our learners’ skills development and progression.
At our college, we want green skills to be the social purpose for our learners. We want them to have that added value to what they do in life, so they’re able to support themselves and give something back to their communities. We want our students to embrace change through green skills and personal development, not as a burden but as an opportunity to grow and innovate, honing their skills to match jobs out there that are just waiting to be invented.
