The (In)visibility of the SDGs in Students' Learning in England: Evidence From Focus Groups With 15‐Year‐Olds

ABSTRACT

Within the English key stage four curriculum, where pupils are preparing for standardised assessment at age 16, many subjects include content pertinent to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, due to the assessment focus and exam content of this educational phase, these are rarely explicitly referenced or discussed. Within the context of Global Citizenship Education (GCE), this paper explores the response of pupils in a secondary school in England to resources taken from The World's Largest Lesson—a teaching resource which addresses the SDGs through citizenship, climate justice and the environment. Through engaging with these resources we invited young people to take part in focus groups to provoke a discussion on where participants had encountered subject content that speaks to the SDGs and their level of awareness of the goals themselves. Many SDG foci were identified in their learning, in particular climate change (SDG 13), gender equality (SDG 5), peace and conflict (SDG 16), hunger (SDG 2) and life on land (SDG 15). The findings include the interconnected nature of the SDGs the pupils had learnt about, juxtaposed with the fragmented nature of the curriculum for assessment and how this fragmentation hampers a ‘joining of the dots’ between SDGs, local and global issues, individual and collective actions, and between formal and informal learning. All of which illustrate a lack of time for reflection and space to allow for connection between SDGs and a transdisciplinary discussion of knowledge.