Let's flip this thing.

The Scottish Government takes great pride in the fact that A Curriculum for Excellence is one of very few curricula in which both Outdoor Learning and Learning for Sustainability are carved into the very bedrock of everything that it stands for.

Outdoor Learning will almost certainly be discussed (again) later on so Learning for Sustainability is to be tonight's focus.

Learning for Sustainability. It's a huge, nebulous mass of stuff that, much like a Magic Eye image, can only really be seen if your eyes go a bit fuzzy. There's so much in thrall to its gravitational pull that its hard to get your head around.

The phrase for starters is brilliantly* nondescript. It alludes to something but can anyone say exactly what? It seems to encompass everything but consist of nothing. To my mind it has all the hallmarks of an excellent basis for any kind of curriculum planning.

Take, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Sustainable_Development_Goals.jpg

The children in our classes need to know about these. As someone said in a room I was in somewhere recently, "there will be 1.8bn young people globally by 2030, whose fires have already been lit regarding the SDGs; we need to feed that fire."

Why are they (the SDGs) not at the heart of our planning? A sustainability-based curriculum that would be able to incorporate all other aspects of the curriculum. Maths, literacy, science, health and well-being, art, social studies and a whole heap more.

Lots of us are doing lots of things to do with lots of them anyway but we get blinded by the need to focus on numeracy, literacy and health and well-being.

Let's flip this thing. Flip it and start with these and see what we can do with them?

Just a thought.

*read 'frustratingly'