The study follows a shift in focus by the OECD to prioritise socio-ecological competencies in school science programs to better equip young people for the world they will inherit.

Associate Professor Peta White, from Deakin University’s Centre for Research for Educational Impact in the School of Education, says changes to the national curriculum in 2022 put a greater emphasis on climate change, but it was still rarely mentioned in the science curriculum and at present is still only taught sporadically in schools.

Encouragingly Version 9.0 mentions climate change 32 times, a big improvement on the previous incarnation, which mentioned climate change just four times.

White’s OECD-contracted report, conducted in partnership with colleagues from the Universities of Waikato, Florida and Stanford University, is set to inform the next PISA science test with more climate change relevant competencies, which is due to be administered by the OECD to 15-year-olds next year.

It is anticipated reforming the PISA Science Framework 2025 will galvanise OECD nations to undertake greater curriculum policy reform, ensuring learning programs that enhance students’ problem-solving skills and preparedness to tackle socio-ecological challenges are prioritised.

White expects this will ensure the Australian curriculum performs well in international comparisons and that Australian students are better prepared for the challenges of an uncertain future.

“This isn’t about replacing physics with teaching students how to be a climate protestor,” White says.

“It’s about creating a deeper learning within the current education model that equips students to be more empowered and effective climate actors.”

She says students may learn aspects of climate change in geography, technology, history, science, English and art, depending on their teachers’ professional preferences, but learning about climate change is one thing; knowing what to do about it is another.

On our current trajectory, climate change will drastically affect current students’ health, wealth and job futures. Indeed, with continued global warming, extreme events such as heat waves, bushfires and flooding will continue to rise in frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent over the coming decades.

“We know it is critical to develop the hands-on skills that support young people to learn how to practice environmental sustainability and how to change social systems to be more ecologically savvy,” White says.

“This is important because the challenges that might be the most essential for them to resolve in 10-20 years’ time might not be known today.”

A strong performance in the PISA is widely believed to be a good barometer of a nation’s future economic prospects, and past results revealed environmental knowledge, attitudes and actions are lacking and unevenly distributed across nations. This prompted the OECD to seek a new set of competencies to be tested in the Science-focussed PISA 2025.

In September last year, EducationHQ chatted to Kim Beasy, a University of Tasmania (UTAS) researcher about a report she co-authored, titled The burden of bad news: educators’ experiences of navigating climate change education.

With continued global warming, extreme events such as heat waves, bushfires and flooding will continue to rise in frequency, intensity, duration. White says we need to be creating a deeper learning within the current education model that equips students to be more empowered and effective climate actors.

Beasy talked then about teachers having to do their own knowledge-build on climate change, with little or no resources being provided for them.

At the time, she said climate change education’s provision nationally was sparse and ad hoc across school contexts, was not mandated, and relies on the efforts of ‘an impassioned few’.

Eco-anxiety, she explained, needed to be addressed.

“[It’s about] how do we do that, because what we found in our research was that teachers were also in some ways apprehensive about introducing climate change or teaching climate change because of the conversations that inevitably occur with students and having to support them through talking about the anxieties that they have around the future,” Beasy said at the time.

“Teachers can only do so much, they’re not trained counsellors, so more support for young people and certainly for teachers, who are often the trusted adults that young people turn to, is required to have these conversations.”

In March, another UTAS researcher, human geographer Dr Chloe Lucas and her team released a report profiling a program called Curious Climate Schools, which across 2021 and 2022 received 464 questions from 1500 Tasmanian children aged 7 to 18. What they found was that climate action was by far kids’ greatest concern.

She said they wanted their education in this area to be more holistic and to be more empowering.

“They understood and accepted the science of how we’ve arrived at this point – what they wanted to know is how they can optimise having a positive impact on the planet moving forward,” she told EducationHQ.

White says school learning activities could include students using science to identify and research local socio-ecological challenges and then enacting informed political activism through lobbying and community advocacy.

This might range from letter writing to local government and MPs to developing school environmental policies and initiating community sustainability programs.

“Students could give presentations and create newsletter articles and posters on their community’s role in clean energy transitions, while in the process fostering traditional learning outcomes parents value from their education such as teamwork, creative and critical thinking, reading, writing and other key science concepts,” she says.

“Students could also work together to design and build a new biodiverse garden, for example, applying practices from science, mathematics, English, technology and the arts.

“This has the potential to make science wonderfully transdisciplinary while supporting students to solve important and pressing socio-ecological challenges.”

White says as the fallout of socio-ecological challenges become more apparent, we need to consider if our educational system prepares young people to address problems related to how we generate energy, produce food, process waste, manage materials and design our communities.

‘We know the magnitude of the climate crises can lead to eco-anxiety,” she says, echoing Lucas’ findings in her research.

“But we also know that hope for the future is often strongly linked to a sense of agency or knowing how to act and what to do about it.”

Click here to access White’s research paper, Agency in the Anthropocene: education for planetary health, published in The Lancet Planetary Health.