A blog providing ideas and resources for those teachers hoping to teach the new GCSE Specification, first announced in April 2022. Draft subject content released for consultation in June 2026 - for first teaching from 2028 or 2029.
“We need nature education at the heart of school life so everyone has access to it, not just middle-class people who go to the countryside at the weekend and have big gardens.
It’s the kids in very urban areas who I had in mind because the whole idea of the GCSE is to make natural history on your doorstep something you are fascinated by.
We have such a crisis in the mental health of our young people and nature is known to be a very healing thing.”
It's a great pity if this is seen as 'political' and something that the new Government can't get behind and move to the next phase with. It has the potential to offer something distinctively different from other curriculum offerings.
As Mary says at the end of the piece:
"Nature can’t afford to be a political football. We need future generations to understand or care for the natural world.”
At the time of starting the planning and draft posts for this blog, the awarding body OCR set up a hub to share the work that is being done so far on the qualification and the development journey of the progress towards the official approval.
I presume that updates will appear here first, so I have followed the various accounts and also set up Google Alerts for various terms.
A Cambridge Assessment seminar provided the following detail on the new GCSE:
Environmentalist and campaigner Mary Colwell began working to address a gap in education content in relation to nature and our environment nearly 10 years ago. In 2019 she began exploring how to make this vision a reality and gathered the support of MPs, environmental organisations and over 10,000 signatures on a UK Parliament Petition for the development of the secondary school curriculum.
With the support of Tim Oates CBE, Director of Assessment Research and Development, Mary has worked closely with OCR and Cambridge Assessment, the Natural History Museum, The Wildlife Trusts and others to explore the purpose, design and delivery of a GCSE in Natural History. In 2020 a proposal was submitted to the Department for Education (DfE) for the development of this new qualification.
At this Cambridge Assessment Network seminar, Mary addresses her reasons for embarking on this campaign, including the lack of understanding of nature and its impact, the challenges we face in the future and the important role education can play in overcoming them.
She is joined by Tim Oates to discuss the process of developing a proposal around this new qualification and the steps involved in helping to shape early thinking about what a Natural History GCSE might look like.
There was a consultation which had the following results:
Keep an eye on this over the year(s) to come as this will be an important element of the development work that is under way.
