Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

Climate Courage campaign

The primary school that added climate resilience to its safeguarding policy

↓

Meet Danielle Ware & Sara Farish, Co-Sustainability Leads, Drake Primary School,
Thetford, Norfolk

Year 3 teacher Danielle Ware and forest school lead Sara Farish are reshaping how climate change is taught at Drake Primary School by beginning in geography and science, linking global impacts to children’s local experiences in Norfolk, and expanding from there. Alongside factual learning, lessons make space for pupils to acknowledge feelings such as eco-anxiety and connect them to practical action. As this work developed, the school took the rare step of updating its safeguarding policy to formally recognise climate impacts as a risk to children’s wellbeing and education.

Climate Courage case studies Each week, we're sharing one of our stories of pioneer educators demonstrating what proper climate education can look like. Explore the rest

Drake Primary School in Thetford, Norfolk is quietly reshaping climate education around truth, care and constructive hope.

Danielle Ware (Year 3 teacher) and Sara Farish (forest school lead) are the school’s joint sustainability leads. They started their journey with CAPE’s (Climate Adapted Pathways in Education) Climate Wise Schools course – training both teachers describe as transformative. “It gave us the scientific facts… and it really helped our confidence.” says Ware. “You can't just expect to do this work if you haven't built on your own knowledge and understanding.”

They expected to learn more about the science. What they didn't anticipate was how quickly facts would give way to feelings. “I hadn’t heard of eco-anxiety,” Farish says. “But then starting to learn about climate change, I was feeling it myself … Going through those emotions has improved my ability to be able to support the children, because I can actually relate to it.”

Transforming this new knowledge into action was the next step. “Don’t rush. Do it well and do it once,” is the pair’s advice for other schools.

Rather than racing to overhaul the entire curriculum, Ware and Farish have begun with geography and science, carefully mapping where climate naturally weaves in and making it come alive for children.

Both are keen to emphasise the importance of local connections to global issues. Coastal erosion in Norfolk sits alongside the Solomon Islands. Flooding in nearby towns is discussed beside global sea-level rise. “For them to see it happening in their local context and link it to climate change, that's what we've just started to do with our curriculum… How might climate impact a child growing up in Thetford in 2025?”.

Teaching climate emotions, not just climate facts

A defining feature of Drake’s approach is the emphasis on emotional literacy alongside rigorous facts, with every climate session including space for eco-anxiety and constructive hope.

This modelling matters. Farish describes moments where children watch footage of disappearing islands or burnt forests and fall silent. “You could see that they were really shocked,” she says. “As teachers, we have those conversations and say, well, I just watched that and actually it made me feel really sad, and it's okay to feel that way.”

​

Constructive hope, they stress, is not naive positivity. It’s always tied to tangible action: planting a “halcyon forest” where every child names a tree; maintaining an allotment and wetland area; writing sustainability updates in the weekly newsletter so learning ripples out into families; and encouraging pupils to make household changes, like sorting recycling or noticing when water is wasted.

“We must start empowering these children to know that they can take action and they can make a change,” they say.

One of Drake’s most innovative steps – rare among UK schools – has been incorporating climate change directly into its safeguarding policy.

The updated policy now formally recognises climate impacts as risks to children’s safety, wellbeing, and consistent access to education. “​​We are all held accountable for it,” Farish explains. “It's also something that does bring it home that this is something that's happening now.”

A whole-school approach

None of this, they emphasise, would be possible without a supportive leadership team and governing body. The school had already installed solar panels and invested in electric minibuses before the curriculum work even began. When sustainability leads from other schools visit Drake, Farish and Ware give the same advice: don’t rush. Build foundations, build confidence and build community.

Staff training is a crucial part of that. Many teachers last encountered climate science when they were pupils themselves, and Drake’s leads are aware of the emotional labour involved. The school’s wellbeing structures – quiet outdoor spaces, worry boxes, regulation stations – are used to support adults as much as children.

Both teachers are clear about one systemic barrier: the absence of statutory climate education from reception to the end of secondary school. “I don't think it should be a choice whether the schools decide to weave it in or not… It needs to be part of the statutory curriculum,” Farish says.

Drake Primary shows what is possible within the constraints of one state primary school: careful, relational, hopeful. But as the climate crisis accelerates and emotions heighten, Ware and Farish argue that schools cannot carry this work alone: “Our children could leave and go to their secondary school and then they never touch it again. All the schools need to work together.”

This case study was written by Sarah Trott.

Please help keep this campaign afloat!

To date, Climate Courage has been a lean, high-impact operation. In 2025, we operated on just £60,000 to build our strategy and produce this film. We have already secured half of our 2026 budget, but we need at least £30,000 more.

This is the bare minimum of "bridge" funding that allows us to move from a grassroots campaign and give us the stability we need to secure further funding and turn this into a national resource. Your support will allow us to deliver:

• A high-impact media push to get teacher and student voices into the national press.
• A digital directory connecting schools and teachers directly with mental health and adaptation experts.
• Fundraiser time to ensure we can untap the larger core funding needed to ensure that education’s evolution doesn’t miss the "inner dimensions" of the earth crisis.

From our network

Across our network, people are creating space for hope, action and connection. Here are a few upcoming opportunities and events you might want to be part of.

​Royal Meteorological Society’s Climate Literacy Survey 2026 · Open January-March 2026

If you are a secondary teacher, consider getting your students to take part in the 2026 Climate Literacy Survey, which aims to identify regional and other variations in school leavers' understanding of climate change and its impacts. In England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man, those in Year 11 can take part; in Northern Ireland, Year 12, and in Scotland, S4. In England, participating in the Climate Literacy Survey could form part of your school’s Climate Action Plan.

​Climate Staffroom​ · Online, multiple dates and times

Come along to a confidential and non-judgmental space for educators to process their own emotions with respect to the climate and ecological crisis, in a community of teachers that "get it". Reserve a place here.

​Climate & Nature Education Festival · London, March 14

Along with the Ministry of Eco Education, NEU, UCU, Unison and the Campaign Against Climate Change, we are co-organising this one day event.

Join other educators, activists, politicians, business leaders, governors, parents and charities from across education spectrum to explore the role of educators in organising for a just transition and discuss questions including 'How can we teach difficult climate truths without overwhelming ourselves or our students?' and 'How can we stop greenwashing in education?'?

The event will culminate with the release of a co-created statement to share the learnings and outcomes of the day.

What we're reading

• CAPE (Climate Adapted Pathways for Education) has just released three new guides on how to teach climate change through the primary geography, art and science curriculums.
• ​This new report from the Sustainability and Climate Change Working Group of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), which set out to provide a picture of current sustainability and climate change education provision within teacher education in the UK, featuring insights from 47 institutions.

Till next time,

Josephine