Natural History GCSE

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Ansell]

I thank my hon. Friend for that most timely intervention. The forest school movement is to be greatly encouraged. It has inspired a raft of initiatives across the country, including in my constituency. It brings children into that natural environment, where learning is almost by osmosis; it is so natural and incidental. In that environment, children develop a great love of nature, which is so necessary to inspire that desire for further understanding and to learn about respect and protection.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady on bringing the debate to the House. Forest schools were featured on “Countryfile” on Sunday past, which was incredibly encouraging. My constituency has something like that: Castle Gardens Primary School. When the Minister of State for Northern Ireland came over—he replaced this Minister in that role—we visited Castle Gardens to see what it was doing. Does the hon. Lady agree that there is a place for children understanding the world around them? For many, that will provide their future employment and livelihood, which is important. Does she further agree that we should work closely with Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs here and the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs back home to align environmental jobs with this exciting prospect of a GCSE?

[Caroline Ansell]

I concur with all that the hon. Gentleman said. That love of nature that we want to inspire in the youngest children needs to find progression and continuity in every age and all the key stages of the curriculum. Ultimately, that will provide them with skills and insight for a future where, as we look to build the green economy, we need to build a green workforce, too. I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s contribution.

[Caroline Ansell]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention; she is my near neighbour along the coast. I had the great pleasure and privilege to speak to Mary this week ahead of today’s debate. I am a huge admirer of her work and her passion to see the next generation equipped and empowered for the future that faces them, in terms of both protecting our natural environment and having a great love for that environment, which is important to their wellbeing.

I would like to focus on another point mentioned by the hon. Lady, which is what this unique qualification would bring to the curriculum. An important gap has been identified and worked on by OCR, not least around the knowledge of organisms in their context, as she described, but also around the mix of subject areas where this GCSE could bring such powerful learning. Some have raised concerns that this subject overlaps with other subjects, such as biology or geography, but we see overlap in the curriculum as it stands. We see overlap between economics and mathematics; we see overlap between history and English. Some say overlap, but I might say reinforcement and consolidation. I might say that this triangulates and makes learning more powerful through the experience of encountering common subject matter across different disciplines. So the hon. Lady is right to highlight this subject’s unique and distinct contribution, in both its mix and its content.

[Jim Shannon]

We have all become admirers of Mary Colwell, and perhaps the hon. Lady agrees with her when she said:

“A GCSE in natural history would reconnect our young people with the natural world around them. Not just because it’s fascinating, not just because it’s got benefits for mental health, but because we’ll need these young people to create a world we can all live in, a vibrant and healthy planet.”

That underlines what the natural history qualification the hon. Lady is trying to achieve could do for many of our children, while not in any way undermining the place of traditionally taught history, which has a role to play in the curriculum.

[Caroline Ansell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, whose point was well made. This is not an “instead of” qualification; it is potentially an “alongside” or an “as well as”. It complements study across several different disciplines, not least opening up employment prospects, as he described. I go back to that inherent truth that one cannot protect what one does not love. We need to connect with that great love of nature and then reinforce that with the knowledge, insight and skills required to bring conservation work forward. It will be such an important torch for this generation to carry forward.

We have all seen in our schools some of the work that is being done, either in the curriculum or extra-curriculum in the wider life of the school, alongside this heightened concern for the environment. The truth is that eight in 10 children who were interviewed by Natural England in its People and Nature survey agreed that being in nature made them very happy. This generation has not had the same opportunities as previous generations to enjoy our once rich natural environment. Almost half of UK species are in long-term decline, including key species such as the hedgehog, whose numbers are down 95% since the 1950s. We have ploughed up or concreted over large swathes of native habitat in the last century, including 97% of our wildflower meadows.

Access to nature is highly unequal. One in five children living in England’s most deprived areas spend no time at all in the natural environment. The consequence of this precipitous decline is what is known as the shifting baselines phenomenon, whereby successive generations simply become accustomed to ever lower levels of biodiversity, unaware of the greater abundance enjoyed by those who came before. The raucous dawn chorus of a century ago and the splattering of insects on the car windscreen, which were commonplace in our childhoods, are unknown to young people today. One survey found that 83% of five to 16-year-olds could not identify a bumblebee, one in four could not identify a badger or robin, and almost half could not identify brambles, blackberries or bluebells.

Although they have never been so far removed from nature, eight in 10 children and young people in England say that they would like to do more to protect the environment and that doing so is important to them. It is that gulf between, on the one hand, the knowledge and experience of the natural world that are required to protect it and, on the other, the growing concern about ecological decline that a new natural history qualification could help to close.

We know just how important education is if we are to overcome the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. Sir David Attenborough has called for a greater role for nature in our schools, highlighting the growing absence of nature in young people’s lives and the negative impact that this is having on their wellbeing and that of the planet.

Sir David’s plea was reinforced earlier this year by the landmark Dasgupta review into the economics of biodiversity, which was commissioned by our Treasury Ministers and published to widespread acclaim internationally. It emphasised the importance of integrating nature studies into the curriculum. Professor Dasgupta argued that this would improve health and wellbeing and—going back to the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—empower young people to make informed choices, as well as hold Governments and businesses to account for their impact on the natural world.

With the right knowledge and skills, all young people, whatever their background, can and should contribute to the great national and global effort to halt nature’s decline. After all, that mission is now the law of this land. We are the first country in the world to set a legal deadline for halting nature’s decline by 2030, thanks to the landmark Environment Act 2021, which also contains a suite of measures to clean up our air and waterways, reduce waste and increase biodiversity.

Recognising the essential contribution that schools, teachers and young people can make to protecting our environment, the Education Secretary launched the Government’s climate and sustainability strategy for schools at COP26. I commend the Government for their leadership and ambition, and teachers and students in Eastbourne will relish the chance to increase biodiversity in their playgrounds and contribute to rewilding efforts in our community—indeed, they are already doing so.

It would be most remiss of me were I not to mention at this point the latest members of Parkland, where llamas now join ducks and chickens, or of West Rise Junior School, which now hosts water buffalo, which find their way into every element of the primary curriculum, from art through to mathematics and beyond.

The Eastbourne Schools Partnership, which is now the Coastal Schools Partnership following the inclusion of schools from Seaford and Bexhill, is a group of partner schools that have formed the Reconnect Group, which meets to discuss ways to help young people re-engage with the natural environment. It was inspired by a similar group called the Millennium Kids, an Australian group that it linked up with during Eastbourne’s Making Natural History conference in November 2020. The Reconnect Group is working with the Eden Project in Eastbourne as it looks to develop Jubilee Way as part of the Queen’s Green Canopy project and make it somewhere where young people can do exactly that: reconnect with the environment. The group will be walking Jubilee Way this weekend, as part of the research, so that pupils can contribute ideas to Sir Tim Smit and his team for different learning zones along the way. It is a 10-year project. Good things are happening.

What is more, the Government’s Skills and Post-16 Education Bill will help plug the green skills gap. I and colleagues in the Conservative Environment Network believe that they could go even further by setting a requirement in law for the Secretary of State to publish a green skills strategy.

It is within that context—a world-leading Environment Act, a stronger emphasis on climate change in the national curriculum and a green skills revolution—that the Government could also look to introduce a natural history GCSE. It would be a part of the whole—a jigsaw piece. It would demonstrate to schools, students and parents the high value we place on study in this area.

The proposed GCSE was developed by Cambridge Assessment and OCR following an extensive consultation that received more than 2,000 responses. I am pleased to say that the Eastbourne Schools Partnership sat on the strategic advisory group. The results are most impressive and very compelling: 94% of the young people who responded said that they would have liked to study the GCSE, and 96% of UK teachers and educators who responded were interested in teaching the qualification.

The natural history GCSE would reflect progression within the existing curriculum. It builds on nature observation content in key stages 1 to 3, providing a good capstone assessment at 16 that brings together those threads in a way that existing courses in geography and biology cannot.