Kim Biddulph
Head of Engagement Programmes, EngineeringUK
Kim has nearly 25 years of experience leading large-scale education, skills and engagement programmes. She has built a career on driving innovation, delivering measurable impact, and aligning initiatives her passion for sustainability and systemic change.
EUK Education welcome recommendations from Teach the Future
At EUK Education we aim to support teachers to develop and embed a cohesive STEM careers offer to ensure students are aware of the many rewarding careers in engineering and tech that contribute to a thriving green economy. We look for ways that we can make a disparate and confusing landscape of STEM outreach more understandable and accessible for teachers. We welcome recently published reflections from the youth-led project Teach the Future.
Teach the Future is a youth-led campaign to urgently repurpose the entire education system around the climate emergency supported by the charity Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS UK).
Over the summer, students from Teach the Future and beyond met online to discuss how the climate crisis shows up – or doesn’t – in our schools and colleges. What they found was a set of shared frustrations. Climate and nature are often siloed into certain subjects, touched on only briefly, or taught in ways that feel disconnected from students’ real lives. They explored opportunities to approach climate education in creative and empowering ways across the whole curriculum, including English, geography, science, maths and D&T.
Teach the Future identified some cross-cutting themes:
- interdisciplinary learning matters: the climate crisis doesn’t fit neatly into one subject, it can be covered across the curriculum
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solution-focused teaching empowers: learning only about problems creates anxiety, but exploring solutions builds confidence and hope
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real-world application is vital: students want education that equips them with skills and links to their lives
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storytelling and creativity are powerful and can inspire action in ways statistics alone can’t
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outdoor and experiential learning works: independent projects and hands-on experiences help make climate education feel meaningful
At EUK Education we agree wholeheartedly with these key learnings from Teach the Future. It brings together in one place research that we gathered as we were developing our Climate Schools Programme. That climate education should be solutions-focussed, experiential, have real-world application and be cross-curricular in nature – and it’s ready to be used with 11 to 14 year olds in secondary schools across the UK.
The Climate Schools Programme comprises lessons across science, geography and English, assembly and form-time resources as well as guidance and support to set up a youth-led Climate Action Club. It focuses on linking curriculum learning to engineering and tech climate solutions and future jobs. Hands-on activities exploring how renewable energy works form an essential part of the programme, and project-based learning can be undertaken in the Climate Action Clubs. Teachers have been highlighting how useful the programme is at making those explicit links across the curriculum:
"Kids are very good at compartmentalising topics - geography, history and the rest. But if you can make it a little bit across all of them, they can see how things overlap a bit better”
Over 350 schools engaged with the programme last year – join us now!
Explore the Climate Schools ProgrammeThe planet is in danger, but the lessons have made me feel more hopeful for the future of our planet.
— Student taking part in the programme
