‘Why I feel teachers should be given the freedom to openly support their striking students’

It’s abundantly clear that this government has failed to recognise the scale of the climate crisis, and doesn’t appear to be prepared to make the decisions today that are needed if we are to avoid disaster.

In 2019, the year of climate change awakening, we are still approving plans for new coal mines, expanding our airports, relentlessly perusing fracking, and hiking up VAT on renewables by 15 per cent while fossil fuels remain at fiver per cent.

Our children, unable to voice their opinion through the ballot box, have no choice but to take action and as their teachers we have a duty to support them.

Signs at the last youth climate strike

I am frequently astonished at how clearly my students perceive the threat of climate change, which is strange seeing as the science has remained clear and consistent since we first learned about the effects of greenhouse gasses on temperature.

You would think we would all share such clarity. Attenborough is right when he says that “they can see perhaps more clearly than the rest of us who have been around for some time”.

Self-interest, greed, and an unconditional love of capitalism and all its trappings has blinded our vision over time. This clear perception of the danger and challenge at hand starts at a remarkably young age.

Last week while I spent some time in a primary school in Bristol, an eight-year-old girl approached me with an urgent look on her face. “Would you like to join my club?” she said. I enquired what the club was, and was told that it was an environmental club that she was setting up. She then went on to tell me all of the plans she had for the school, and when the first meeting would be.

Later that same week during the classes show-and-tell a young Year 3 boy stood up and proudly showed off his green Blue Peter eco badge, awarded to him for a letter he had sent to them expressing his concern about climate change and suggesting ways we could prevent it.

This sort of passion puts many of us to shame, who, despite being acutely aware of the facts of climate change, may never have penned a letter or organised a group in our lives.  Encounters such as those serve as a charger for my own involvement in the issue, reminding me what passion and enthusiasm about solutions looks like.

And the verdict from the students is out, our politicians have failed us, and they are taking matters into their own hands. As Greta Thunberg so beautifully put it: “Change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power lies with the people.”

How then, should we respond to this as teachers? On the morning of the first Youth Strikes For Climate teachers at many schools up and down the country were told that they should not encourage students to strike, and to remind them that if they did they could face repercussions.

This appears to be the position of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), which released a statement saying that “pupils should only be out of school in exceptional circumstances. Whilst NAHT supports the right of young people to express themselves, first and foremost, pupils should be in school during term time”.

This presents teachers with a difficult decision. Do they support their students or do they toe the line despite their conscience telling them the opposite? Yet when the UK declares a climate emergency the threshold for “exceptional circumstances” has surely been crossed, meaning students have adequate grounds on which to strike.

Almost all major climate related research being published at present indicates that temperature rise, ocean acidification, polar ice melt, forest fires, carbon dioxide concentration, and numerous other indications of environmental collapse are progressing at exponentially higher rates than even the most pessimistic predictions of a few decades ago. These are certainly exceptional circumstances, and this is certainly an emergency.

Last month the National Education Union voted through an important motion making that decision a professionally easier one. The motion, which marks a shift in policy towards actively encouraging and supporting students who wish to strike, instructed their executive to “stand in full solidarity with their striking students”, “oppose any reprisals against students taking action to fight”, and pledged to “support future student action”.

And this surely must be the attitude of classroom teachers if we are to successfully meet this challenge with the speed and decisiveness that is required. If teachers are given the freedom to actively engage with students, they will become a seriously powerful force for change.

The students, with their passion and enthusiasm for solutions, stand to learn a lot from their teachers about how to run meetings productively, how to communicate their message effectively, and how to direct their passion and anger to the right people in the form of political lobbying.

This is first and foremost a student led movement, and as teachers we should allow our students to take the lead, develop their own strategies, and peruse their own goals free from our influence. We can, however, help facilitate their efforts, and use our experience to make them a more effective force.

And what is the alternative for these students? When Teresa May tells them their time is better spent in school becoming future professionals who can help solve climate change she forgets that the very professionals she is talking about are repeatedly, and continuously, ignored.

So much so that Farhana Yamin, a top climate lawyer who had a large part to play in the Paris Climate Agreement, felt moved to glue herself to the doors Shells London office she felt so strongly called to action.

We love civil disobedience – when it’s in the past. We teach about its potent effect in our classrooms, telling the stories of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ghandi, Mandela and the change they successfully fought for. Yet when people are fighting that fight on our doorstep, a fight so profound it effects all people everywhere, we are reluctant to support them.

I hope one day Greta Thunberg’s name will be among that list of giants we celebrate in the classroom, and I hope I can say that I did whatever I could to support them in their fight. That is why I will be shall be supporting my students when next they strike, and urge you to do the same.

Stuart Swift

Stuart Swift is a Secondary Philosophy & Ethics and PSHE teacher based in Bristol. He is also a published journalist with work covering a wide range of issues including environmentalism in the music industry.

Read more: Hundreds of Bristols schoolchildren ‘strike’ over climate change