J.R.A. Williams
In Enabling Education Review Issue 12 (2024) I wrote about education systems, and especially schools, which demand compliance, are backward looking and have failed to adapt to the momentous changes of the last hundred years. Those changes have now reached a tipping point with the breakdown of the Earth’s climate systems. Adaptation is the only route to survival.
Tackling the crisis
New systems, human or natural, must develop to deal with threats to global food and water security and consequent social disruption and conflict. Replacing our dependence on the fossil energy sources that have caused the crisis is a priority for all. Responses to extreme weather events – lethal heat, devastating floods, destructive storms – must be planned through anticipatory action, early warning, and disaster risk management. Droughts, rising sea levels and other slow onset emergencies must be countered with strategy and resources.
The greatest need is for education. I don’t mean the schooling of replication and discipline aimed at preserving the enormous privilege and benefit of elites, but education that helps us adapt to and overcome the consequences of their activities. More than ever, we need creativity, problem solving and critical thinking – all of which are at the heart of inclusive education.
Living together well
Inclusion means adults, as well as children, learning and relearning what we need to live together well. To achieve this, the Index for Inclusion (2016) suggests the curriculum subjects shown in Fig.1 are needed.
The Index is a resource that invites dialogue within educational settings. It offers a framework of inclusive values, and a contrasting view of the excluding values found in so many educational settings worldwide. These excluding values within education – such as hierarchy, consumption, self-interest, power and competition – are the same values we are increasingly understanding as drivers of the climate crisis
Learning from Whole School Improvement
So how do we get from exclusive to inclusive values, not just in education but in the wider environment too?
One of the few successful approaches to educational change has involved Whole School Improvement. The whole school is the place and its surroundings, the people and the community around it. Improvement means change from one thing to something better. Whole School Improvement involves everybody – administrators, staff, students, cooks, caretakers, cleaners and guards, parents and carers, and the wider community – in a process of making things better. It involves taking account of everything in and around the school; the buildings, the curriculum, the approaches, the schedules, the people and the places.
The Index for Inclusion provides a methodology and materials in the form of indicators and questions to help us plan for inclusive whole-school development. But the Index’s principles and processes can be adopted by any formal and non-formal educational setting in any community, and can help us think about inclusion in relation to climate change. In every context we ask, “who is excluded, what are the barriers to their inclusion, and how can these be lowered”. The process, sometimes called action research, is described as a continuous cycle. (See Fig.2.)
Learning for climate action
“Education is a powerful but under-used instrument for climate action.”
(World Bank)
The climate crisis is upon us, but it is not too late to build the capacity and resilience we need to reduce our vulnerability to its effects. But simply talking about climate change is not enough, there must also be empowerment to act. The values inherent in inclusive education, and the problem-solving, critical-thinking action research approaches we use to address educational inclusion barriers, should also be at the centre of our responses to the climate crisis. Making education more inclusive and surviving the climate crisis are two sides of the same coin.
Notes
Booth, T., & M. Ainscow (2016). The Index for Inclusion: A Guide to School Development by Inclusive Values. Cambridge: Index for Inclusion Network. A new website version will be available in 2026.
Download older versions of the Index for Inclusion in multiple languages from: https://bit.ly/eer2025-1
Sabarwal S. et al (2024) Choosing our Future Education for Climate Change. Washington DC: World Bank
Contact
Contact JRA Williams through EENET.