Meet Sarah Dukes, English & Art teacher; Sustainability Lead, The Chase Secondary School, Malvern
When students at The Chase School in Malvern demanded their headteacher declare a climate emergency in 2019, English teacher Sarah Dukes stepped up to support them. Now the school's sustainability lead, she's found that her subject is "a bit of a gift" for emotionally literate climate education. Using nature writing, reflective discussion and time outside can give pupils space to process difficult feelings. But reflection alone isn't enough: Dukes has seen how facilitating real agency supports emotional wellbeing too.
"We must give our students hope and we must give them truth. And those two things are so hard to marry sometimes."
"It began with our climate emergency," recalls Sarah Dukes, English teacher and sustainability lead at The Chase School in Malvern. "The students desperately wanted to declare a climate emergency. They gave such impassioned speeches to our headteacher. It was brilliant."
That was 2019, and the student-led push has since grown into a whole-school approach to climate education. Dukes, a part-time English and Art teacher, was given dedicated timetable time to take on the work – just one period a week, but more than most teachers in her position get. "I do get time on my timetable for that, which is brilliant," she says, while acknowledging it's nowhere near enough for the scale of the task. Most teachers passionate about climate education are doing it wholly in their own time, because it's not yet a priority.
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Crucially, Dukes hasn't tried to do this alone. She's set up a staff steering group for sustainability, so it doesn't feel like it’s solely her pushing. She has worked with Teach the Future, whose student activists support schools to run "teach the teacher" sessions that Chase School's eco-committee now delivers to staff as training. She's drawn on the Ministry of Eco Education for staff training, collaborated with UCL's Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education, and recently began working with Learning through Landscapes.
The partnership she established with the University of Worcester has been particularly fruitful – for three or four years now, PGCE students have visited The Chase to see what nature connectedness looks like in an English classroom, watching staff teach Dara McAnulty's nature writing before taking pupils outside to write their own pieces.
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Time for both reflection and action
"English is a bit of a gift," Dukes explains, "because we get students to respond to what they're reading through discussions, debates, and reflective writing. This fits brilliantly with climate learning that supports emotional wellbeing, because we're carving space in the lesson for students to process what they've been taught." Teaching Dara McAnulty – who celebrates nature while also lamenting its loss – gives pupils the language to sit with difficult feelings. "They have time to process what they're learning." Sometimes that simply means taking a lesson outside – letting pupils experience the clouds, or write under a tree that's bright red in autumn.
Dukes has also been given slots in the school's staff training programme to share resources and bring in external trainers – helping colleagues feel equipped to embed climate and nature into their own subjects.
This year the school has started mapping the curriculum to find interdisciplinary connections. In Year 8, pupils study migration in Art – exploring birds, feathers and migration patterns. This now runs alongside English lessons on The Survival Game, a novel about people migrating due to climate change. "It's very powerful for the students because they've got shared vocabulary and shared ideas being taught at the same time."
Dukes has also found that agency itself is a form of emotional support – but she stresses that it has to be real. "Concrete action is really important to support emotional wellbeing," she says. Too often, school tasks feel performative; students know their work is going nowhere. PSHE, tutor time and citizenship lessons offer good opportunities for this. Students can explore a specific issue – like food waste in the canteen – then act on it: writing to catering staff, creating pieces for the school newsletter, or encouraging parents to rethink packed lunches. The key is that the action feels real.
She describes a week during COP when she arranged for all Key Stage 3 English pupils to do the same homework: writing emails to their local MP about climate. Over 450 emails went out. One stuck with her: a student had written, "This is just homework. You are not even going to send this to Harriet Baldwin." But Dukes did send them – and the MP wrote back, then visited the school. "It was really powerful for the students because they actually got to see their letter having an impact."
Working with grief and hope
It’s crucial to remember that this work takes an emotional toll on teachers too. Dukes says she sometimes holds back from going too deep with students. "I worry it's too sad. I feel like I'm in mourning sometimes, and I don't understand why not everybody feels this way."
The challenge, she says, is balancing honesty with care: "They must know the truth – it's our moral obligation. But you also have to balance that with hope. It’s really tough, because you just don't want to be the one to add to their emotional load."
Dukes is quick to acknowledge that her work at The Chase is only possible because of a supportive senior leadership team. But she's clear-eyed about the barriers. "It's still seen as an add-on. It's seen as something that's nice to do if you have the time. And of course teachers don't often have the time."
For climate education to become embedded across schools, she argues, it needs to be a government and Ofsted priority – with real accountability. "If the sustainability lead was a member of the school's senior leadership team, it would be in the training days at the start of the year. It would be within everybody's focus. But I don't think that will happen until it's a government and Ofsted priority."
This case study was written by Josephine Lethbridge.
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.
This toolkit contains the materials needed to deliver a day’s worth of Carbon Literacy training within schools. Uniquely designed and developed for staff, governors and volunteers, the materials provide the skills and knowledge needed to bridge the gap between climate change policy and climate action.
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.
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
- This recent academic study looks at the ways in which climate change affects young Australians’ mental health, moving beyond a narrow concept of “climate anxiety” to explore the interaction of emotional, cognitive, and behavioural processes involved. The study is based on a large national survey of 19,501 young people aged 15–19, and analyses how climate perceptions combine with coping strategies, personal vulnerabilities, and contexts to shape wellbeing.
Till next time,
Josephine
