Climate Action Toolkit
Our innovative Climate Action Toolkit supports secondary school students, and their teachers, to engage and collaborate with the whole-school community on climate action.
It does so by empowering lead groups of students, applying behaviour change thinking and offering practical guidance.
Sign up for a FREE Climate Action Survey and report
We have secured funding from Movement for Good so we can offer a survey for free to schools, on a first come, first served basis. Find out what it involves below.
To take part please contact schools@interclimate.org. We will be happy to answer any questions.
Inform and motivate your school’s Climate Action Plan
InterClimate Network’s (ICN) research reports (2021-2023) showed that a majority of secondary school students are already motivated to make a difference. It can, however, be difficult to know which climate actions will make the most difference and which approaches will work best in your school. This student-led Climate Action Toolkit is intended to help transform willingness to act into tangible action.
Carefully designed and tested, the toolkit will:
- Help implement the new UK Strategy for Sustainability and Climate Change.
- Increase 11–18-year olds’ say in sustainability decisions that directly affect them.
- Develop new knowledge and skills, including through learning with experts.
How does the toolkit work?
A lead team of students (e.g. an eco-group), alongside their teacher, work with us, to undertake a combination of activities:
1. Run a Climate Action Survey
Students will be tasked with rolling out our online survey across their school, aiming for as many students as possible to ‘have a say’ and be involved in plans for climate action.
We will analyse the data and provide schools with a personalised insights report that gives a clear picture of:
- what students are doing to take climate action;
- what barriers are preventing them from taking further action;
- what would motivate and enable students to do more.
ICN also draws together findings from participating schools and shares these widely via national platforms.
Resources
2. Create informed campaigns for action
Students can use this sequence of activities, at their own pace, to emerge with well thought through campaigns for climate action in school.
For those that have completed a Climate Action Survey, your schools insights can inform campaign development.
Resources
- Download our Climate Activation planning sheet before you start and use Activities 1 – 3 to guide you through it.
- Activity 1: Decide an overall climate action that you want to focus on in your school or community.
- Activity 2: Investigate the challenges or barriers that might prevent your chosen climate action from taking place.
- Activity 3: Choose useful behaviour change techniques to motivate the changes you want to see happen in school.
3. Participate in Climate Activation Workshops
This series of skills-based workshops will help students as they plan and sustain change.
We provide experts’ input on areas of behaviour change and communication practice, with a focus on specific skills – communication, analysis, understanding your audience, presentation.
Details of workshops coming soon.
Resources
Feedback
“I found it useful to learn how to properly plan and execute an eco-project.”
Student, 2023
“We have used the Toolkit to prove that our school does want to make a change and we have used it as part of our funding campaign.”
Teacher, 2022
“The report findings are informing our Eco Schools Action plan and the priorities that we are working on this year.”
Teacher, 2022
Case study: Lyndon School
During 2021, Climate Action Survey insights helped enable a group of students at Lyndon School in Solihull to form a Climate Action group, with the help of a highly proactive Geography lead teacher.
Knowledge from the survey helped students prioritise their efforts and they developed two core aims:
- To educate pupils on the impact that their actions have on the environment and the world around them.
- To mitigate this impact by enacting strategies which can be adopted in everyday life at Lyndon by staff and pupils.
Students also lead presentations with:
- Years 7-10, in which they also educated students on the role that plastic has on the environment and climate.
- Senior Leadership Team, which included what they thought the next steps should be.
They’ve had media coverage about their work, such as an interview that was played on local radio stations!
Partners and Supporters
We are grateful to the expert input into the survey and activity design provided by our pilot schools, sociology students at the University of Gloucestershire alongside the research firms Globescan and Humankind Research.
The toolkit and our support to schools has been made possible through the support of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the abrdn Charitable Foundation the Dr Martens Foundation, European Union Erasmus+ Programme, The Grocers’ Charity and Heart of Bucks Community Foundation.
If you would like to enquire about supporting the further development of the Climate Action Toolkit, or partnering with us, please use the button below.