Select Committee on Environmental Audit Written Evidence


APPENDIX 33

Memorandum from the Railway Land Wildlife Trust and Research Fellow at the University of Sussex

1.  INTRODUCTION

  1.1  I hope that my skills and experience both on the ground and through research may be of relevance to the committee. I founded a Trust in 1988 to provide an educational role for former railway sidings in my home town of Lewes, East Sussex. The area had become "derelict" and subject to a three week planning inquiry. A reduced development of the site resulted, and the Trust has taken a lead in a number of ways, especially in giving children a voice in many aspects of the site. For example, in 1996, a Junior Management Board was set up to illuminate aspects of the site for the District Council management committee. Board members have tackled issues such as adjacent sports floodlights left on late at night, the design of a children's leaflet, leading an opening ceremony of a signal box ecology centre by David Dimbleby and meeting the Environment Minister, Michael Meacher who publicly stated that he would like to see initiatives like this "rolled out across the country".

  1.2  As a founder member of the FERN Environmental Education Research Network and a research fellow at the University of Sussex, I was a contributor to the 1998 "Education for Sustainable Development in the Schools Sector" which played a role in establishing ESD within the revised National Curriculum. In addition, as a Citizenship Tutor for Secondary post graduate teacher-training, I have professional and practical insights that underpin the voluntary work described above as well as the submission which follows.

  1.3  This submission is based on the importance of action and empowerment, as opposed to tokenism, on the ground at a very local level. This can fall within a national strategy posed in question two of the inquiry but it emphasises the significance of very local conditions which the inquiry is urged to consider. The recent announcement of new sustainable communities could provide a starting point for such an approach.

2.  BUILDING ON THE WORK OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION PANEL

  2.1  The work of the Panel has helped to establish education for sustainable development in the school curriculum but one key component is underplayed. This is the ability for young people not only to experience wildlife areas close to their homes but to contribute to the management of such places. Such an emphasis on the natural world within the three-legged sustainable "stool" of environment, society and economics is deliberate and will demand some imaginative and coherent thinking. There are both constraints as well as opportunities at the current time.

3.  THE CONSTRAINTS

  3.1  The school curriculum is still dominated by important, but limiting, Government strategies. This pressure on time has resulted in a narrowing of the curriculum underlined in paragraph 111 of An Evaluation by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of the National Literacy Strategy which states that, "the most worrying aspect of the reduction of time for the foundation subjects is the tendency of schools to cut back the very aspects of subjects, notably practical and investigative work, that enable pupils to apply and refine what they have learned and that provide vitality and challenge. This represents a serious narrowing of the curriculum." (HMI No.332. 2001) Fewer children are getting the opportunity to experience natural areas within a social and learning setting and unless we reverse this trend, we will have a generation that do not even have the capability, let alone the will, of understanding why such places might matter.

  3.2  Another constraint is the lack of facilities to serve urban wildlife sites or, where such sites exist, the continual pressure to raise money to run them.

4.  THE OPPORTUNITIES

  4.1  The introduction of Citizenship provides a window of opportunity within the school curriculum and beyond, through the notion of "active citizenship". The wish to develop "alternative inclusive approaches in planning and delivering parks and green space services" (paragraph 96 of the Interim Report of the Urban Green Spaces Taskforce, 2001) also offers an opportunity beyond that of the school curriculum.

  4.2  The inclusion of robust wildspace areas within the Government's sustainable communities initiatives in the Thames gateway and elsewhere, served by a variety of education centres that are an integral part of the planning gain, would provide a radical but practical approach to learning the sustainability lesson, from which best practice would emerge. Funded and conceived from the very start of the process instead of a bolt-on idea towards the end of the development, such centres would become the hub of debate, experience, exchange of skills, recording of change and evolving approaches to the emergence of sustainability as a core value of our nation. There is now a firm research base (eg Journal for Environmental Education Research) that could inform such developments, including the increasing use of information technology within and between such centres and communities.

  4.3  Such an approach would go a long way to countering two key points identified in Cultural Trends No. 38, "Local Authority Historic Parks in the UK," published in 2001: namely, the loss of records to inform the running of such sites and the loss of the sense of ownership by key workers as a result of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (p.69).

  4.4  Campaigns and national strategies will play their part in delivering sustainable development but unless local people are engaged at a local level, they will founder. Key places such as the Centre for Alternative Technology, the Barnes Wetland Centre and Bishops Wood Environment Centre provide leadership and inspiration which needs to be translated to a more local level. New communities that are provided with the means to shape and influence "natural" environments within their development from the start could provide crucial insights for existing communities and an inquiry such as Learning the Sustainability Lesson could be the catalyst to bring such thinking about.

February 2003




 
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