What's Under Your Feet? Teaching Soil Health in Schools

Soil is almost entirely absent from the school curriculum. For something so fundamental to food, climate, and biodiversity, that seems like a huge mistep to me. This post makes the case for why teaching soil health deserves a place in climate education, and how to connect it to what teachers are already teaching.

Soil is one of the most complex and important ecosystems on the planet. A single tablespoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than there are people on Earth. UK soils store approximately 10 billion tonnes of carbon. Around 95% of all the food we eat depends on healthy soil to grow. Teaching about this has to be a part of our sustainability education.

Especially when you read that 40% of UK agricultural soils are already degraded.

Why soil is a climate story

Soil is the world’s largest terrestrial carbon store. Healthy soil holds more carbon than all the world’s plants and the atmosphere combined. When soil is healthy, undisturbed, and rich in organic matter, it actively draws carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it. When soil is degraded, all that stored carbon is released back as CO2.

This means that the way we manage land is both a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and a significant potential solution. Restoring degraded soils to health is one of the most cost-effective climate interventions available. According to the FAO, every dollar invested in land restoration yields between seven and thirty dollars in economic returns.

2024 was a particularly stark illustration of this in the UK. Extreme rainfall that year produced the second worst harvest on record for England, with analysis estimating a reduction of around £600 million in farming revenue compared to 2023. Degraded soils that could not absorb rainfall led to waterlogging and crop loss. The flooding that damaged communities across the country was made worse by land that had lost its capacity to hold water.

Healthy soil is not just good for farmers. It is good for everyone downstream.

The key insight for pupils: Soil is not just where food grows. It is a carbon store, a flood buffer, and one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. When we lose healthy soil, we lose all of those things at once.

What healthy soil actually does

It is worth being specific about what we mean by healthy soil, because it is more than just the absence of degradation. Healthy soil:

Stores carbon in organic matter, keeping it out of the atmosphere
Absorbs and holds rainfall, reducing flood risk and maintaining water supply during dry periods
Supports a vast web of living organisms; bacteria, fungi, earthworms, beetles, mites, nematodes – that decompose organic matter, cycle nutrients, and make food production possible
Provides the nutrients that plants need to grow without requiring large inputs of synthetic fertiliser
Maintains structure that allows plant roots to penetrate and access water
Supports surface biodiversity – the insects, birds, and mammals that depend on soil organisms as the base of their food chains

Mycorrhizal fungi deserve a particular mention. These remarkable organisms form networks between plant roots, transferring nutrients and water in exchange for carbon sugars from the plant. They are destroyed by tillage and fungicide use. Their loss is one of the least-discussed consequences of intensive farming – and one of the most significant.

What is going wrong

UK soils are under pressure from multiple directions:

heavy farm machinery compresses soil, reducing its capacity to absorb water and support root growth
repeated ploughing destroys soil structure, releases stored carbon, and kills the fungal networks that plants depend on
growing the same crop year after year depletes specific nutrients and reduces the diversity of soil organisms
heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides reduces the need for and diversity of soil biology, creating dependency on inputs while degrading the underlying ecosystem
building on land removes soil permanently. Once soil is under tarmac or concrete, its ecosystem functions are gone
hotter, drier summers and more intense rainfall events both damage soil structure, creating a feedback loop where climate change degrades soil, which then accelerates climate change

The UK picture

40% of UK agricultural soils are degraded due to intensive farming — Carbon Brief, 2025.
The second worst harvest on record occurred in 2024, partly due to degraded soils unable to absorb extreme rainfall.
UK soils store approximately 10 billion tonnes of carbon — but only if they remain healthy.
The Environment Act 2021 includes a target for 75% of soils to be sustainably managed by 2030, but critics say targets lack specificity and enforcement.

Where it sits in the curriculum

Teaching soil health connects naturally to content teachers are already covering.

At KS2:

ScienceL Living things and their habitats: soil is a habitat, home to more species than almost any other. Decomposers — the organisms that break down dead matter and return nutrients to the soil – are a statutory part of this unit and a natural entry point for soil science
Science: Plants: what do plants need to grow? Soil structure, organic matter, and the living organisms that make nutrients available are all directly relevant
Geography: Land use and farming: how food is grown, where it comes from, and what intensive farming does to the land over time
Geography: Physical geography: healthy soil absorbs rainfall; degraded soil causes runoff and flooding. This is a concrete and local connection

At KS3:

Biology: Ecosystems and interdependence: the soil food web, decomposition, nutrient cycling. Soil is where the carbon and nitrogen cycles happen
Chemistry: The carbon cycle: soil carbon storage and release should be part of any carbon cycle lesson, but is frequently omitted
Geography: Food security and sustainable development: global soil degradation, desertification, regenerative farming
Citizenship/PSHE: Who owns the land, who profits from intensive farming, who pays the cost of degradation, and who has the power to change things

A curriculum audit question: Does your scheme of work for the carbon cycle include soil carbon storage and release? If not, adding it takes one lesson and significantly improves pupils’ understanding of why land management matters for climate.

What good teaching about soil health looks like:

The tablespoon statistic is the best entry point for any age group. More organisms in a tablespoon of soil than people on Earth is a fascinating fact.
Even a small patch of school garden or unmaintained ground can support a soil investigation. Compare soil from a maintained lawn, a neglected corner, and a planted bed.
Think about connection between their lunch and the soil it grew in.
Whatever flooding has happened near your school or in your region in recent years is connected to soil health. That localisation makes the science concrete
Who owns degraded land? Who pays for restoration? Who decides how farmland is managed? These are genuine political questions with no simple answers, and they are appropriate for secondary pupils

Practical starting points

National Education Nature Park

Free programme with tools for recording soil biodiversity on school grounds. Connects biodiversity recording to curriculum and contributes to a national dataset.

SAPS — Science and Plants for Schools

Practical guides for soil investigations in primary and secondary classrooms, including wormery construction, soil texture analysis, and organic matter measurement.

RHS Campaign for School Gardening

Resources for connecting growing, soil, and curriculum — particularly useful for primary.

Ground Level — What’s Under Your Feet?

The free notyetzero classroom activity covers KS2 and KS3 in one resource — pupil sheets and facilitator notes. Download from the Ground Level page.

The bottom line

Soil is invisible to most people because it is underground and because we have designed food systems that abstract us entirely from it. Most children, and most adults, have no idea that the sandwich in their lunchbox depends on billions of living organisms in the ground, or that the flooding in their town is connected to how nearby fields are farmed. Climate education should be making that explicit – aoil is not a niche topic for agricultural colleges. It is a story about food, about flooding, about biodiversity, and about one of the most important climate solutions available to us.

It is also, when you get into it, genuinely fascinating. There are more species in a handful of healthy soil than in the Amazon rainforest. That is worth a lesson.

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The free Ground Level resource ‘What’s Under Your Feet?’ covers soil health for KS2 and KS3 in a single four-page activity. Download it from the notyetzero Ground Level page. For curriculum support, Carbon Literacy training, or climate action planning, get in touch.