Former Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman has warned that climate change activists are frightening children with ‘alarming’ lessons in schools.
(Ofsted is the office for standards in education. It is responsible for inspecting a range of educational institutions, including state schools and some independent schools).
According to Spielman the teaching resources provided for free by eco charities and campaign groups, contain overwhelmingly negative messages that were causing shock and spreading anxiety.
The Mail On Sunday reports: And in a stark intervention, she said she feared teachers were too often treating children like ‘mini-adults’ by piling pressure on them to save the planet, which was depriving them of a proper childhood.
Organisations including Greenpeace, WWF and the British Red Cross offer free climate change teaching resources to schools.
WWF’s Climate Crisis! poster paints a grim picture of a world where huge numbers of species are at risk of extinction if the Earth heats up, and that ‘every part of our world’ is being affected by the rise in carbon dioxide.
Eco zealots Extinction Rebellion have also offered ‘climate breakdown’ lessons for schoolchildren.
Ms Spielman said that while teaching resources may be well-intentioned, they ‘impose a great deal of anxiety’ on children.
‘Negative messages attract the most attention for campaigns, so any material produced by campaigning organisations is going to be framed around some shock messaging, the idea being to prompt people into action, and, for children, that can induce anxiety,’ warned Ms Spielman, who headed the Government inspectorate for seven years until last December.
She added: ‘We shouldn’t be asking children to carry the weight of the past and the responsibility of adults on their shoulders.
‘They need time to grow and build resilience to be able to function as adults, and perhaps we tend to treat them as mini-adults.’
