Before snack time, something minor and a little out of the ordinary is taking place at a few nurseries in the UK. As part of a structured, multi-year credential system with its own passport and awards ceremony, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, three and four-year-olds are asked to name wild birds, sort recyclables, and discuss where their food comes from. This is not a one-time craft activity.
OMEP, a child-rights organization founded in 1948, is the driving force behind it. Over the past fifteen years, it has developed what it refers to as Education for Sustainable Citizenship. The name is awkward. The concept beneath it is not. OMEP has attempted to integrate sustainability into the way very young children already learn, through play, repetition, and relationships with parents and “key persons” at their nursery, rather than treating it as an environmental topic bolted onto an existing curriculum.
It’s important to take a moment to consider how this truly began. The Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development was an audit tool used by OMEP-affiliated researchers in ten countries between 2010 and 2014: Chile, China, Kenya, Korea, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, the UK, and the US. That is an exceptionally broad scope for early childhood research, and the results, which were published in 2016, served as the foundation for the award program that is currently being implemented in UK nurseries. The patience of it seems almost archaic—ten years of preparation preceded the public-facing program.
The program itself is based on what OMEP refers to as a “ESC Passport.” You would never guess that from watching a toddler identify a robin in the garden, but each child gathers up to fifteen stickers while working through a set of “I-care…” booklets that cover social-cultural, economic, environmental, literacy, and numeracy themes. These themes are loosely mapped onto the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The tasks, which include identifying habitats, naming birds, identifying cultural diversity, and sorting waste, are purposefully low-tech. Here, neither a tablet nor a worksheet are necessary.
One of the bigger chains to implement the program, Tops Day Nurseries, began with a baseline audit and set a goal of obtaining Bronze accreditation by September 2023. According to them, this timeline was largely dependent on parents participating in the activities at home. It may not seem important, but that detail is crucial. The foundation of OMEP’s entire approach is the notion that sustainability cannot simply be taught in the nursery and then forgotten by dinner; rather, it must be discussed at home between parents and children.
In all of this, it’s difficult to ignore how purposefully OMEP avoids gloom and doom. The materials are characterized as “celebratory rather than problematic or dystopian,” which seems like a subtle but significant decision considering how much adult climate messaging leans in the opposite direction. To be honest, it’s unclear if that optimism will endure as these kids grow older and the stakes become more difficult to lower.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child gives children a voice in decisions that impact their lives, including sustainability, and three years old isn’t too early to begin exercising that voice, according to a more subdued argument that runs beneath the program. A sticker book, according to critics, is a flimsy means of promoting citizenship. Advocates would argue that early habits, such as observing birds and inquiring about the disposal of waste, are more likely to endure than lectures given later in life.
Scale plays a role in what follows. In addition to training its own award assessors, OMEP UK is expanding the program beyond larger nursery chains with marketing budgets to include childminders and preschools. It probably won’t be evident for a few more years whether it becomes a significant standard in early childhood education or remains a specialized credential that a few hundred nurseries proudly display.
