Who Is Climate Education Actually For? Working Class Communities and the Green Transition

Today’s independent inquiry into white working class educational outcomes makes sobering reading. Just 18.6% of white working class pupils achieve a good pass in English and Maths GCSE. Fewer than half reach expected levels of development in the early years. The attainment gap is large, persistent, and opens early. This post is not primarily about that report. But its publication is a useful moment to explore climate education through that lense – and to ask: who is climate education actually for? Who can actually access it, and what are we hoping to achieve?

Because if you look at most climate education resources, curricula, and campaigns – and ask honestly who they are imagined for – the answer is rarely the communities that are most likely to be left behind by the green transition, or most affected by the costs of climate policy, or most directly employed in the industries that are changing fastest.

Working class communities and climate education: a different starting point

There is a persistent and damaging assumption in climate communication that working class people are either indifferent to the environment or actively hostile to climate action – even though the evidence does not support this.

As researcher Dr Mya Bamber has written, working class communities have lived experience of environmental degradation that wealthier communities rarely share. They are more likely to live near polluting industries, to work in hazardous environments, to live in areas with poor air quality, and to have the least ability to buy their way out of these conditions. They are, as she puts it, both metaphorically and literally at the coal-face of environmental deterioration.

Working class communities are not enemies of climate action. We are often its most direct victims – and potentially some of its most powerful advocates, if climate education recognised and built on that experience rather than speaking past it.

The jobs question: honesty about an unjust history

Climate education often treats the transition away from carbon-intensive industries as straightforwardly positive – a necessary and welcome shift toward a cleaner economy. For communities whose livelihoods have depended on those industries, it can feel dismissive or even insulting.

The UK has been here before. The closure of the coal mines in the 1980s was, in retrospect, one of the most significant environmental transitions in British history – it did dramatically reduced the UK’s carbon emissions but it was also devastating for the communities it affected. Workers and unions were ignored, mines closed abruptly, and whole towns were left without economic support for decades. Many coalfield communities still have not recovered.

This is not ancient history and it has shaped how working class communities in former industrial areas relate to climate policy today, when a pupil whose family worked in oil and gas, or steel, or heavy manufacturing hears that their family’s industry is ‘bad for the planet’, they are not wrong to feel something complicated about that. Same goes for farmers after all.

Good climate education does not avoid this complexity – it should engage with it directly:

Name the history honestly – the miners’ strike, the communities that were left behind, the decades of underinvestment that followed
Distinguish between the industries and the workers – criticising an industry’s carbon impact is not the same as criticising the people who work in it
Talk about the green jobs that are coming – offshore wind, heat pumps, retrofit, electric vehicles. These are real jobs, in many cases in the same communities and requiring similar skills. But they need to be actively created and fairly distributed

The just transition concept

A just transition means moving to a green economy in a way that is fair to workers and communities avoiding the failures of the 1980s coal closures.

The TUC, Green Alliance, and the Institute for Public Policy Research have all published accessible guides to what a just transition looks like in practice.

The cost question- one example: electric cars and the access gap

Climate education frequently features electric vehicles as a solution to transport emissions. But the way they are discussed often assumes a level of economic access that many working class families simply do not have.

The average price of a new electric vehicle in the UK is still over £30,000. Second-hand EVs are becoming more available but remain significantly more expensive than equivalent petrol cars at the cheaper end of the market. Charging infrastructure is concentrated in wealthier areas and home charging, the most convenient and affordable option, requires off-street parking that many working class households do not have.

This does not mean EVs should be avoided as a topic. It means they should be discussed with honesty about who currently benefits from them and who does not, and what policy changes would make the transition fairer.

The same applies across the green economy and other ‘sustainable choices’. Heat pumps cost significantly more to install than gas boilers. Retrofit insulation requires either significant capital or access to schemes that are frequently oversubscribed and hard to navigate. Solar panels are cheaper than they were but still represent a significant upfront cost. Organic and locally sourced food costs more. The green choices that climate education promotes are frequently less available to families on lower incomes.

This is not a reason to stop promoting these solutions. It is a reason to be honest about the barriers and to ensure that climate education does not inadvertently make working class pupils feel that the problem is their family’s choices rather than the systemic conditions that shape those choices.

Access to further education and climate careers

Today’s report highlights the stark gap in access to higher education for white working class pupils – just 3.2% reach a highly selective university, compared to a 6.1% average. Post-16 pathways are a particular concern, with WWC pupils reporting transition as significantly more difficult than their peers.

Climate and sustainability careers are growing fast – but access to them is not equal. The green economy encompasses everything from offshore wind engineering to ecological surveying, from retrofit construction to environmental law. Some of these careers require university degrees.

Climate education has a role to play here – not by pointing every pupil at a degree in environmental science, but by:

Making the full breadth of green careers visible: skilled trades, the apprenticeships, the technical roles that do not require a traditional academic route
Connecting climate learning to local economic contexts – what green industries exist or are coming to this area? What skills do they need?
Working with careers education to ensure that green careers are presented as relevant to all pupils.
Highlighting the transferability of existing working class skills, construction, engineering, manufacturing, into the green economy. These are not separate worlds

The green economy needs people from working class backgrounds, the jobs are there. The barrier is often awareness, connection, and the confidence that these opportunities are genuinely available.

Green careers resources

Green Careers Hub — a free resource for schools and careers advisors on green jobs across all sectors and qualification levels.

Good Work Alliance — working on fair work and good jobs in the green economy.

What this means in the classroom

None of this means climate education should be softened or made less urgent. It means it should be more honest about who bears the costs of climate change and who bears the costs of climate action, about the structural barriers to green living, and about the history of industrial communities and the green transition.

Practically:

When discussing carbon-intensive industries, acknowledge the communities that depend on them and the history of what happened when those industries closed without adequate support
When discussing individual green choices, name the cost and access barriers explicitly, you can always redirect toward collective and policy solutions, not just personal behaviour
When discussing green careers, include the full range – trades, apprenticeships, technical roles – not just professional and graduate pathways
When using examples of climate action, include examples from working class communities and trade union campaigns, not only middle-class consumer choices or corporate sustainability pledges
When discussing climate justice, include economic justice – the idea that a fair transition has to work for everyone, not just those who can afford it

And perhaps most importantly: listen. If you are teaching in a community with a working class or post-industrial history, the pupils and families in front of you have knowledge and experience of the relationship between work, environment, and economic precarity that no curriculum document captures. That knowledge is an asset, not a problem.

The bottom line

We need to make sure that climate education doesn’t speak to only to those who already have the resources to make green choices.

The communities that have contributed least to climate change are often those most affected by it, and most affected by the costs of transitioning away from the economy that caused it. Working class communities in the UK have lived that experience across generations, from the pollution of industrialisation to the abandonment of post-industrial towns.

And so they deserve climate education that takes their experience seriously, speaks honestly about cost and access, names the injustice in the history, and opens doors to the green economy rather than assuming those doors are already open.

Getting this right is not only an equity issue but also a practical one. A green transition that leaves working class communities behind will not succeed, not economically, politically, or morally. Climate education that engages honestly with class and the green transition is one of the places that success starts.

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notyetzero supports schools with carbon literacy training, climate action planning, and curriculum development. Get in touch.

Related reading on notyetzero.com

Words Matter: A Guide to Climate Vocabulary: Looks at how language choices in climate education can embed assumptions about class, access, and who climate action is for.

Postcards From Elsewhere: What the World Can Teach Us About Climate Education: Includes examples of climate education that starts from community experience — including from communities with least resource