In 2022, two student organisations, SOS-UK and Teach the Future, reached out about an exciting project. Anticipating a change in government, they wanted to get academics and teachers to completely rewrite the national curriculum in England to include sustainability in every subject, and every year level. Their thinking was simple: when a new government opened the curriculum for review, they would be ready to show the Department for Education how to embed sustainability everywhere.
That prompt from youth was the start of Regenerative Economics for Secondary Schools. With the help of Kate Raworth, Oxford economist and author of Doughnut Economics, and other academics and teachers, we embarked on a complete revision of first the GCSE and then the A Level economics courses. That work was published online in May 2023, and from there the project has gone global, including throughout Europe, to update economics education for the 21st century.
The problem
Secondary school economics courses around the world often teach a narrow version of how the world works. Students learn that people act as rational, self-interested individuals maximising their own utility. They learn that firms exist to maximise profit, and that a growing economy is the main marker of success. Nature appears briefly, if at all, as one input among others, a source of raw materials rather than a system the economy depends on and operates within. Unpaid household care work and the shared management of common resources (water, fisheries, community land, intellectual outputs) are ignored. Power, values, and ethics almost always sit completely outside the analysis.
Meanwhile, today's students are already living with the consequences of an economy built on those misguided assumptions and omissions: climate change, biodiversity loss, and widening inequality. The gap between what the curriculum teaches and what students already understand about the world they are inheriting has become too hard to ignore.
Regenerative Economics for Secondary Schools is a free, open-access curriculum and movement built to close that gap.
The Regenerative Economics textbook and course
Regenerative Economics is a full two-year course: a syllabus, specifications, and a modular textbook written for a student audience aged 14-19. It is structured around an introduction that highlights the social and ecological embeddedness of the economy, and topics that cover the four broad ways people organise to meet their needs: households, markets, commons, and the state. Students study unpaid household care work and the shared management of common resources alongside firms and government policy, so all four sit on equal footing rather than treating the market as the default and everything else as an afterthought or ignoring it entirely. The course also covers money and finance, and global exchanges, all through a pluralistic and justice-oriented lens.
The course also has a dedicated subtopic on systems thinking. Students learn to read the economy as a dynamic, living system rather than a mechanical one, made up of feedback loops, stocks and flows, and tipping points, where changes can compound or cascade in ways that simple cause-and-effect models miss. For example, they see how efficiency measures meant to reduce resource use can instead drive higher consumption, a pattern known as the rebound effect. They examine how concentrations of wealth and power reinforce themselves over time, shaping political, social, ecological, and economic systems in ways that make existing inequalities harder to shift.
Each section of the online textbook follows the same structure. Content is built around explanatory text with real-world case studies and data. Each section includes one-to-six activities that teachers and students can use in their classrooms to deepen understanding of the content. Most activities can be completed in one class period, a practical length for busy schools. Auto-marked questions check for understanding, and there is a curated list of further links to videos and other resources for students who are particularly interested in the topic. Each section has a terminology list with a link to the same list as interactive flashcards and other terminology games. Beyond individual sections, each of the seven topics also has a list of longer project ideas, so classes that want to go deeper than a single lesson have a ready path to do so.
Reaching teachers and the systems around them
The textbook now has more than 2,500 active users a month, from over 140 countries. The project works on two levels at once.
At the classroom level, teachers use the free materials directly, supported through webinars, in-person training days, and a growing online community. The International School of the Hague is running the first full two-year Regenerative Economics course anywhere in the world, and teachers elsewhere are adapting it for single lessons, units, or longer.
At the systems level, the project engages directly with the institutions that decide what every economics student in a country learns. Economics education runs through a small number of powerful bottlenecks: national education ministries and international curriculum authorities like the International Baccalaureate and European Baccalaureate, which together shape the curriculum experienced by millions of students. Regenerative Economics has provided feedback to the Economics and Business Economics reviews in the Netherlands, has served as an official curriculum reviewer for New Zealand's Ministry of Education, has fed evidence into curriculum reviews in Ireland, England, and Scotland, and has been participating in the curriculum review for the International Baccalaureate for the past two years.
The two levels feed each other. The textbook gives curriculum authorities a concrete example of what a reformed economics course could look like, already tested in classrooms. Teachers bring it into their own lessons now, and the results from those classrooms become part of the case for authorities to update their curricula.
Economics reform and citizenship education
Regenerative Economics sits within climate education, but it is also a citizenship project. Students are asked to question economic assumptions and narratives, to understand relationships of power that concentrate wealth and distort political and media systems, threatening democracy. They weigh fairness across generations and between the Global North and Global South, and consider their own agency in an economic system. Those are the same habits of mind that democratic participation depends on.
Curriculum change like this doesn't happen through a textbook alone. It takes teachers willing to try a different course in their own classrooms, and institutions willing to ask whether their curriculum actually prepares students for the world they are inheriting. The syllabus, textbook, and teacher community are free, at https://www.regenerativeeconomics.earth/home. If you teach economics, try out the materials with your class, even a single lesson, and see how students respond. If you work with a curriculum authority, ask what your own review process would need to embed sustainability and systems thinking properly, and get in touch. Change to a national curriculum starts with people willing to challenge the status quo.
Please log in or sign up to comment.