As Department for Education (DfE) Youth Focal Points, it is our role to channel youth voice directly into the Department for Education and champion the work of the Sustainability and Climate Change Unit. We have had a fantastic few weeks of meetings with ministers, including almost unprecedented access to an all-ministerial meeting in the DfE.
In February 2025, we met with Ministers from across the DfE including Stephen Morgan, Minister for Sustainability in Education; Jacquie Smith, Minister for Skills; Catherine McKinnell, Minister for Schools and the Curriculum; Janet Daby, Minister for Children and Families; the Parliamentary Private Secretaries Alan Strickland and Emma Foody, the Permanent Secretary Susan Acland-Hood, and Directors from across the Department to discuss our work as youth focal points.
In an all-ministerial meeting, organised by Minister Morgan, we were able to speak with Ministers and the Department’s senior leadership about the views of young people in light of the curriculum and assessment review and the Government’s Clean Energy Superpower Mission and new Industrial Strategy.
It was fantastic to speak with Minister Smith about how work around Green Skills can serve the Opportunity Mission- and how we can work to ensure young people from all backgrounds and from all regions of England can be served by the transition and gain access to highly skilled, well-paid jobs. This is integral to the Government’s Opportunity Mission; the Government is breaking the link between a child’s start in life and their future success, and by providing opportunities to develop skills related to low-carbon energy and climate change mitigation to everyone, including the most disadvantaged, we can work to stop the perpetuation of structural inequality.
From our meeting, we are working with SOS-UK to explore ways to ensure that the next cohort of youth focal points includes strong representation for young people engaged in vocational pathways, and are also working to set up a visit to a vocational education session to learn more about how technical qualifications are providing opportunities around the transition to low carbon and the building of climate resilience.
The Ministers were interested in our work on the refresh of the Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy, and we spoke about how we had fed into policy and what we would like to see from a future iteration of the strategy. We spoke about the success of the National Education Nature Park, and how we would like to see this go further, and we also spoke about the need for much more extensive support for teachers and more guidance about how the strategy fits together. Minister McKinnell was interested in our views on the potential outcomes of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, and we discussed how the young people we speak with would like to see climate change embedded much more deeply within a wide range of subjects.
We also spoke about the challenges of ‘doubling-up’, where young people learn similar content about climate change across different subjects but don’t build on this knowledge, and also discussed the focus in the current curriculum on the mechanisms of climate change and the problems it creates rather than ways we can mitigate and build resilience. The Ministers were really receptive to this conversation, and we are working towards setting up a meeting with Minister McCarthy to discuss this further.
More recently, we have been pleased by the Interim Report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, which has acknowledged the need for wider engagement with Climate, amongst other issues, and the need to approach this from both a scientific and cultural perspective. We are really heartened by the commitment from the review to consider climate change in such strong terms, and we are really excited for the next cohort of youth focal points who will get to work around the implementation of the Review’s recommendations.
On 20th March 2025, we met with Minister Morgan again, this time alongside Kerry McCarthy, Minister for Climate Change, to discuss the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s public participation plan, and how the Department for Education’s work can serve the needs of the transition alongside young people. It was really interesting to discuss how we can further youth voice and representation in DESNZ’s work, and also how we can increase public engagement with some of DfE’s schemes, for instance by furthering work with the National Education Nature Park amongst MPs and through London Climate Action Week. We are looking forward to working with DESNZ teams in the future to support with furthering this work, and also looking at how we can address climate anxiety and empower British young people to embrace the opportunities of the transition.