Something very interesting is going on in British early years education. Childminders who work from living rooms and back gardens are already incorporating sustainability into their services, while formal nurseries with their staffing structures, compliance calendars, and governance committees are still debating how to do it. Not going to talk about it. Getting it.
Possible that this has something to do with the framework itself. The OMEP UK’s Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Citizenship is based on what kids already know, notice, and care about. It seems to work better in places where one person makes the decisions and can follow through with them tomorrow morning.
The framework, which was made after research in ten different countries and was based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is not meant to be an extra part of the curriculum. That difference is more important than it seems at first. There are a lot of new educational programs that are put in formal nurseries between phonics and outdoor play. That’s not how the ESC approach works. Sustainability shouldn’t just be a Thursday afternoon thing; it should be a part of everything. That kind of integration is just how things work for a childminder.
If you go to the home of a registered childminder on any given Tuesday, a toddler might be helping to sort the recycling. This isn’t because it’s part of a lesson plan, but because that’s how things are done in the house. A three-year-old daughter is asked what the sparrow on the fence is called. A child reading a “I-care…” booklet and getting a sticker for their ESC passport after finding a place for wildlife to live in the backyard. It’s not a performance. They are habits, and OMEP UK’s framework meets them right where they are.
It seems like formal nurseries have a harder time with the citizenship part in particular. The framework asks settings to do more than just teach kids about sustainability. It wants them to actually live it by getting kids involved in making decisions and helping to build a more sustainable future. That’s a democratic point of view that’s almost philosophical. It comes straight from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says that kids should be able to say what they think about things that affect their lives. It’s really hard to stick to that philosophy when you work in a nursery with thirty kids, four rooms, and a manager who has to deal with a staffing crisis. This is much more likely to happen in a home with four kids and one caretaker.
The auditing process itself is interesting to look into. The OMEP UK rating scale, which was based on a UNESCO-backed tool used in preschools in ten countries from 2010 to 2014, helps teachers figure out what they need to work on and see how far they’ve come. It’s not too hard for a childminder to use that audit tool and look at their own work. It can take months for a nursery with multiple practitioners, different ideas, and institutional inertia to agree on what the audit even means.
Another area where the gap is clear is in how involved parents are. The way OMEP UK works depends on parents and caretakers working with practitioners. They need to sign up for support activities, keep the conversations going at home, and take part in everything from identifying birds to learning about different cultures. Childminders often already have these talks with the families they work with because they tend to become close and stay close with them over time. The framework only gives them a way to work together. Nurseries, especially bigger ones with lots of staff changes and little time for collection, have a bigger hill to climb.
It’s important to note that OMEP UK’s scheme was made to work with a lot of different types of providers, like childminders, preschools, and nurseries. None of the Bronze Award, the ESC Passport, or the fifteen “I-care…” booklets that cover everything from learning about culture and society to starting to use numbers were made to be used outside of school. And good things that nursery groups like Tops Day Nurseries have done to support the program are doing baseline audits and working hard to get Bronze certification across multiple sites. That kind of support from institutions is important.
But there is still a difference between a childminder living sustainably and a big company making it part of its strategy. The first one needs systems. The second one needs conviction. And it looks like conviction is moving faster right now.
