Emma Towers

The intertwined crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation represent profound global challenges. Education holds a unique role in enabling all young people to navigate uncertainty, participate meaningfully in decision‐making and contribute to more just and sustainable ways of living. In 2022, the Department for Education in England published a sustainability and climate change strategy which included the National Education Nature Park (NENP) programme. Using Carol Bacchi's ‘What's the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) approach, we examined the first two years of the implementation of the NENP, analysing published materials ( n = 20) to consider how the purposes of Environmental Education are understood, constructed and implemented. We identified three broad themes: (1) Science and/or STEM knowledge and skills are fundamental to engagement with nature, (2) Measurement is the ‘signature pedagogy’ of the NENP and (3) Nature Connectedness is broadly understood as individual and linked to personal wellbeing. These framings remain largely aligned with a neoliberal, measurement‐driven logic that privileges scientific knowledge and quantifiable outcomes over broader educational purposes. However, there is much to be hopeful about. The whole‐setting approach embedded in the NENP offers valuable scope for cultural and pedagogical change, and the planned broadening of curriculum‐linked resources is promising as it signals a movement beyond a STEM‐dominated model. Furthermore, the professional learning structures afforded by the NENP represent a significant foundation for strengthening teacher confidence, skills and capacity across phases and disciplines. These are hopeful possibilities for strengthening school‐based Environmental Education in England.

Since early 2020, COVID-19 has had a substantial impact on teacher education. We consider novel aspects of how pre-service teachers have collaboratively developed their professional identities during the pandemic. Drawing on findings from forty-five interviews with pre-service high school teachers working in England during September 2020 – June 2021, we share how collaborative identity development was central and occurred in a variety of spaces, communities and modes. Collaborative identity development featured in how pre-service teachers saw themselves making a positive contribution to society through education and, in strong subject connections. Reflection that is collaborative, personalised, iterative, and separate from notions of formal progression enables positive identity work. Notions of identity are absent from international policy initiatives in ITE (Initial Teacher Education). This case study provides insights for policy makers in and beyond England who aim to support teachers at the beginning of their career so that they are retained.

Teachers and teacher education are often presented as “problems” to be solved, with policy solutions that focus on ways to make teachers “better” and improve teacher “quality” by introducing prescriptive strategies. We investigate the ways Covid-19-related changes to university and school-based facets of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England influence teacher quality in relation to both student teachers and early career teachers, working in secondary schools. Drawing on 34 interviews with school leaders, school mentors and ITE tutors, we critically explore the ways in which teacher quality was developed through key aspects of teachers’ pedagogy and practice during the pandemic crisis when schools were closed and teaching moved online. Our findings show that the pandemic crisis has highlighted the different facets of teacher quality which arguably disrupt narrow and prescriptive understandings of what constitutes “quality” in policy terms. Although there were many instances of challenge in the development of new and student teachers, our data also shows how ITE tutors, school mentors and leaders responded creatively to the crisis. Participants highlighted the opportunities afforded by the pandemic to develop diverse and innovative pedagogies and practice, enhance students’ subject knowledge, as well as overcome some of the challenges in other areas of pedagogy and practice. Furthermore, the study shows that teacher quality was not substantially reduced despite the challenges arising from the pandemic and concerns that pre-service teachers would not be ready and prepared for a career in the classroom.

Open access London Review of Education is a peer-reviewed open-access journal. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and subsequent antiracism protests, calls to decolonise the school curriculum have gained traction around the world. Internationally, educational systems have been engaged for some time with how to decolonise their national school curricula in, for example, Australia (Harvey and Russell-Mundine, 2018), Bolivia (Lopes Cardozo, 2012), Canada (Munroe et al., 2013) and the USA (Ladson-Billings, 2014). Such discussions have been amplified following protests from the Black Lives Matter movement both in the UK and worldwide. A sharper focus on the causes of global protests and events has resulted in growing pressures on governments around the world to resolve perceived discriminations embedded within schools' curricula, and to essentially 'decolonise' and diversify education. For instance, hundreds of thousands have signed petitions calling for schools not only to teach the links between the slave trade and imperialism, but also to acknowledge the contributions and achievements of Black, Asian and minority ethnic people in history lessons, and in the school curriculum more widely (Arday et al., 2021). Collectively, this movement aspires to transform inaccurate syllabuses and exclusionary pedagogical practices, and to eradicate the biased knowledge that school curricula can produce, espouse and communicate. Scholars have argued that schools, like universities, can be important transformative sites of intervention and disruption in challenging colonialist legacies in the curriculum (and other structures) and in rehumanising these institutions (Dawson, 2020; Gleason and Franklin-Phipps, 2019). Others have warned of the dangers of relativism in the curriculum that may even entrench racial thinking (Williams, 2017).