What the Ten-Point Plan Actually Means for Your School

In March 2026, a group of over 40 professional bodies and teaching organisations, including the Royal Meteorological Society, the Royal Geographical Society, UCL, the National Association for Environmental Education, and Cambridge University Press, published a report setting out ten priority areas for improving climate education in English schools.

The report followed the government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, which included welcome new requirements for climate and sustainability content across several subjects. The message from the experts was clear: the curriculum changes are a good start, but they are not enough on their own. Real change requires coordinated support across the whole syste, and it requires something to actually happen in classrooms.

Most teachers will not have read the report and so this post is a plain-English breakdown of what the ten points mean. And what, if anything, they mean for your school right now.

The ten points and what they mean in practice

1. Quality-controlling classroom resources

The report calls for better quality control of the climate materials produced by major publishers, ensuring they are scientifically accurate, up to date, and adaptable for local use. Right now, the quality of climate education resources varies enormously. Some are excellent. Some are out of date, oversimplified, or downright misleading.

For your school: Be sceptical of resources that present climate change as a distant or future problem, that focus only on individual behaviour, or that use data more than a few years old. The IPCC, the Met Office, and Carbon Brief are the most reliable sources. Our guide to climate vocabulary can help you spot when language is doing something unhelpful.

2. Reforming exam specifications

The report argues that climate and nature should be examined across multiple subjects, not just science and geography, and that specifications should be updated as the science develops. Currently, exam specifications are slow to change and often lag years behind the scientific consensus.

For your school: If you are a head of department or curriculum lead, it is worth auditing your current exam specifications for where climate content appears and where it is absent. English literature, history, economics, and design technology all have legitimate homes for climate content that are rarely used. The new curriculum review opens some doors here; the exam specifications will follow, but slowly.

3. Expanding enrichment opportunities

The report calls for equal access to climate-related activities outside the classroom – field trips, speaker programmes, eco groups, community projects. Right now, access to enrichment is deeply unequal. Pupils in more affluent schools are far more likely to have access to meaningful climate enrichment than those in disadvantaged settings.

For your school: This connects directly to the working class and climate access question. If your eco group, your climate trips, and your enrichment activities are only reaching a subset of pupils, it is worth asking why — and what it would take to change that. Our posts on eco groups and on climate education and working class communities explore this further.

4. Supporting teachers

Better training and resources for teachers across all subjects — including specific guidance on handling controversial issues in the classroom. This is one of the most acute gaps in the current system. Most teachers did not receive climate education in their initial training, and CPD on the subject is patchy and inconsistent.

For your school: Carbon Literacy training is the most comprehensive and widely recognised route to building teacher confidence and it is accredited, which matters for CPD records. Climate Fresk is an excellent complement for subject knowledge and systems thinking. Both are available through notyetzero. Our guide on navigating political controversy in climate education is also directly relevant here.

5. Defining essential content

The report calls for a core of essential climate content, namely causes, consequences, and solutions, that is compulsory for every pupil, regardless of which subjects they take at GCSE. Currently, a pupil who drops geography and focuses on arts and humanities subjects could go through secondary school with almost no systematic climate education.

For your school: This is a system-level change that schools cannot implement unilaterally. But schools that want to get ahead of it can audit where every pupil in their school encounters climate content.What is the absolute minimum every pupil leaves knowing? Is it enough?

6. Keeping the focus on solutions

The report specifically calls for more emphasis on renewable energy, nature restoration, and green careers – and less on doom. It argues that solutions should be as prominent in the curriculum as problems. This matters because the evidence on climate doomism is clear: young people who only hear about the scale of the crisis, without equal attention to what is being done and what they can do, are more likely to disengage.

For your school: For every lesson that covers the causes and consequences of climate change, ask: where is the solutions content? Where are the green careers? Where are the examples of what is actually working? Our post on tackling climate doomism has more on this.

7. Improving coherence and sequencing

Clearer links between subjects and year groups. Avoiding repetition and building on prior learning. Currently, climate content in schools tends to be fragmented: the same basic facts taught repeatedly in different subjects, with no progression and no joined-up narrative.

For your school: A curriculum audit that maps where climate content appears across all subjects and year groups and identifies gaps and repetitions is the practical starting point. notyetzero’s sustainability audit template can be adapted for this purpose. The goal is a coherent journey from Year 7 to Year 13, not a series of disconnected encounters.

8. Embedding green skills

The report calls for data literacy, critical thinking, and digital skills to be woven into climate and nature teaching across subjects and not treated as separate. Green skills are not just for environmental science. They include the ability to read a graph, evaluate a source, think systemically, and understand risk and uncertainty.

For your school: These are skills that every subject teacher already develops. But are they are connected to climate contexts? A maths lesson on statistics could use climate data. An English lesson on persuasive writing could use climate communication. A history lesson on the Industrial Revolution could draw explicit connections to emissions. The content does not need to change; the context can.

9. Strengthening the wider community

Closer working between publishers, subject experts, industry, and young people – a more connected ecosystem around climate education. Currently, schools operate largely in isolation from the research, industry, and community organisations that could enrich their climate work.

For your school: This is exactly the case for community partnerships with local wildlife trusts, transition groups, community energy organisations, and local businesses. Schools that are connected to their local sustainability community are not just doing better climate education; they are modelling the kind of collaborative, community-based approach that the report is calling for at a national level. See our post on partnering with local sustainability groups.

10. Applying a climate lens to every subject

The most ambitious of the ten points: climate and nature should touch every subject, and every teacher should be equipped to make that connection. Not just science and geography. Not just at GCSE. Every subject, from primary through to sixth form, in initial teacher training and continuing professional development.

For your school: This is where the report is most visionary, and possibly controversial. It also the most distant from current practice. But the direction of travel is clear. Schools that want to be ahead of the curve can start with one question: what would it look like to apply a climate lens to every subject we teach? Not to replace the content, but to connect it.

The 10 point plan and schools – a climate assessment

I think the report is genuinely significant. It represents a rare moment of consensus across the education, science, and geography communities about what good climate education looks like – and what is still missing.

But it is also, in important respects, a document about what should happen at the system level – in exam specifications, in initial teacher training, in publisher quality control. Individual schools cannot implement all of it. And some of the changes it calls for will take years, not terms.

What schools can do right now:

Get staff trained in Carbon Literacy or Climate Fresk – point 4 is entirely within your control
Audit where climate content appears across your curriculum – points 5 and 7 both start with this
Review your enrichment activities for equity – point 3 asks who is and is not accessing climate enrichment
Check the quality of the resources you are using – point 1 is a quality check you can do tomorrow
Build or strengthen community partnerships – point 9 is available to every school regardless of system-level change
Make sure your climate teaching includes solutions, not just problems – point 6 is a lesson design question, not a policy one

Worth knowing: The full report is free to download from the University of Reading’s website. It is readable and specific — worth an hour of a curriculum leader’s time. The link is in the references below.

The 10 point plan and Ofsted?

The report explicitly urges Ofsted to incorporate schools’ sustainability actions and climate education into the inspection framework. This has not yet happened – Ofsted’s current framework does not specifically inspect for sustainability or climate education.

However, several of the areas the report covers; curriculum coherence, enrichment equity, pupil wellbeing, quality of teaching, are already Ofsted territory. Schools that are doing this well are not just ahead of the climate curve, they will also be building the kind of curriculum depth, community connection, and staff expertise that inspection frameworks tend to reward.

The bottom line

The ten-point plan is a useful map of where climate education needs to go, even if the destination is some way off. For most schools, the immediate priority is not the system-level changes but the things within their control: trained staff, coherent curriculum, connected community, teaching that is impactful and honest.

The report ends with a vision for what the education system should look like by 2031. That is five years away. The schools that are building toward it now will not be scrambling to catch up when the exam specifications change, when Ofsted adds sustainability to its framework, or when the next generation of pupils arrives expecting to be taken seriously on this.

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notyetzero offers Carbon Literacy training, Climate Fresk, climate action planning support, and curriculum development for schools at any stage of this journey. Get in touch.