Teaching climate change through making adaptations to school grounds

We advocate teaching climate change through practical, child-led adaptations to school grounds. We’ve collaborated with Stirling University, and the report is out now.

Climate change is an existential crisis. Schools are required to teach about it, but it is a complex issue. New science is emerging all the time, and rapid global change has very different repercussions depending on where you live.

Even on our own small islands, the variety of weather events is broad, and the practical and social consequences are felt very differently by different demographics. Teaching climate change has to take into consideration such thorny factors as climate justice and local livelihoods. Climate anxiety is widespread amongst children. Teachers need supporting too, and so do our own delivery staff.

Our Climate School 180 project

The Climate School 180 (CS180) project ran between 2024 and 2026. It looked deeply at all of these issues and how to best help teachers to convey them. The course consisted of an online module for teachers, a training visit that included auditing the school grounds, usually with a group of children. Then the audit results were delivered to the school with specific resources to help them with the next practical steps.

These steps were ways in which classes could design and implement improvements to their own school grounds that would make an immediate difference to the climate-related challenge facing the school. This could be planting bamboo to shade hot classrooms, creating a wind buffer to protect play areas, creating rain gardens.

The CS180 project engaged over a thousand teachers from 140 schools from across the four nations of the UK. We visited five of them to see how they were adapting to a range of climate challenges. Read the case studies from schools dealing with heat stress, high winds, flooding, poor air quality, and biodiversity loss.

What does this mean for LtL?

Our CEO, Matt Robinson, writes in the introduction:

Through [our previous project], Climate Ready School Grounds, Learning through Landscapes came to understand the urgency of adaptation and the potential of nature-based solutions within school grounds. What became equally clear was the need to deepen our understanding of what high-quality climate change education looks like in practice. If we are to prepare young people for the future they will inherit, we cannot afford to get this wrong.

“I was delighted when Alan and Gill Gray Philanthropies agreed to support Climate School 180. From the outset, this was intended to be more than a schools programme. It was a shared learning journey, bringing together schools, partners and our own team to explore complex questions, connect opportunities and develop meaningful responses to climate change.

“This evaluation from the University of Stirling demonstrates the impact of that work. It provides evidence that climate change education is most powerful when it is place-responsive, participatory and connected to real-world action. It shows how school grounds can become catalysts for learning, helping schools turn a global challenge into something tangible, relevant and hopeful.

The findings in this report strengthen our belief that climate change education, adaptation and mitigation must be embedded across school life. School grounds offer a unique opportunity to connect learning with action, and to help children understand how change can happen in the places they know best. Learning through Landscapes is committed to building on these lessons and working with partners who share our ambition to ensure that every child is equipped not only to understand climate change, but to shape the response to it.

• Read the Climate School 180 evaluation report