There’s a quiet significance to the moment when a local education project crosses a border. It’s not easy to move most frameworks. They are made for certain school systems, cultures, and ideas about what kids should know and when they should know it. The fact that OMEP UK’s Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood was adopted and tested in ten countries was something to pay attention to. The scale was based on British early years practice.
It was OMEP’s job to make sure that the Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood (ERS-SDEC) was used in studies in Chile, China, Kenya, Korea, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, the UK, and the US from 2010 to 2014. In 2016, the results were made public. That project will take four years and involve people from four continents who work in very different social and educational settings as practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. You shouldn’t just skip over the fact that the same assessment tool worked for all of them.
The scale itself came from a bigger worry. Since the UN World Summit in 2005, sustainable development has been thought of as having three pillars that are all connected: sustainability for the environment, sustainability for the economy, and sustainability for society and culture. For early childhood educators, the hard part has always been putting those pillars into practice in the classroom. The ERS-SDEC was made to find out how well early childhood settings were actually doing that work, not just in theory.
The fact that the rating scale insisted on seeing the three pillars as truly interdependent is likely what made it useful in so many different situations. It wasn’t possible for settings to do well in environmental education without taking into account cultural or economic factors. It was also taken into account how communities, families, and children can help decide what is taught through good governance. That’s a more complex framework than what most audits of early childhood try to use.
The OMEP UK Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Citizenship Award is a real-world result of this international study. The rating scale was changed into a system for gradual self-audit, and it was based on an ESC Passport that was given to each child. It’s a real thing—a document that summarizes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, keeps track of the child’s progress with bronze, silver, and gold stickers, and links the child’s learning to real community resources like wildlife parks.
The activities themselves say a lot. Kids get rewards for things like being able to name three wild birds, knowing where animals live, recycling, and being interested in different languages and cultures. None of those things need expensive tools. It needs adult participation, observation, and interest. It looks like the people who made the framework knew that teaching kids about sustainability in the early years will only work if it feels real and close to home, not just theoretical and institutional.
Reading through the structure of the award scheme gives me the impression that the people who made it really believe that kids are capable of more independence than they are usually given in early childhood education. Don’t think of the ESC Passport as just a record. It sees sustainable citizenship as something that starts in childhood and grows over a person’s lifetime. It’s not something that you learn in school, but something that you can build.
It’s still not clear if frameworks like this one will become commonplace in early childhood settings around the world. It takes a long time for things to catch on, money isn’t always available, and education systems rarely change quickly. But the ERS-SDEC has a research base that spans ten countries. This gives it something that most other early years sustainability tools don’t have: proof that it works in different cultures, not just in the system that made it.
