What is a Climate Action Plan?
A climate action plan is a structured plan that helps your school, college or trust identify sustainability priorities, set actions, assign responsibility and track progress over time.
For education settings, a climate action plan should not be a one-off document that is created and forgotten. It should be a working plan that helps leaders, staff, governors, trustees and learners understand what needs to happen, who is responsible, and how progress will be reviewed.
A strong school climate action plan can bring together different areas of sustainability, including estate management, energy use, biodiversity, climate education, resilience planning, procurement, waste, travel and community engagement. It gives your setting a practical route forward, helping you move from good intentions to coordinated action.
What is a DfE Climate Action Plan for Schools?
A DfE climate action plan for schools is a plan that supports your setting or trust to take structured action around sustainability and climate change, in line with the Department for Education’s expectations.
The DfE guidance encourages education settings to nominate a sustainability lead and put a climate action plan in place. This applies across the education sector, including schools, multi-academy trusts, colleges and universities. The aim is to help education settings take a whole setting approach to sustainability, rather than relying on isolated projects or individual enthusiasm.
The DfE does not require every setting to use the same fixed template, which gives schools and trusts flexibility. However, that flexibility can also make it difficult to know whether your plan is comprehensive, consistent and easy to manage. That is where a clear planning structure and the right management tool can help.
Your Climate Action Plan Should Include Four Key Areas
Why Schools and Trusts Need a Practical Climate Action Plan
Climate action planning works best when it becomes part of everyday decision-making. A useful plan helps teams prioritise actions, use time and resources well, and show progress clearly.
Without structure, activity can become fragmented. Energy reduction, outdoor learning, estate resilience and biodiversity projects may all be happening, but without a central plan it is hard to see how they connect.
A practical climate action plan brings priorities, actions, ownership and progress together. For multi-academy trusts, this is especially important, providing oversight across schools while allowing each setting to reflect its own context.
How the Climate Action Management Platform Helps
The Climate Action Management Platform is designed to make climate action planning easier to create, manage and keep moving.
Instead of relying on scattered spreadsheets, static documents or disconnected plans, it gives schools and trusts one structured place to build, monitor and update their climate action plan.
The platform supports each stage of the process, from identifying priorities to assigning responsibility and reviewing progress. It helps teams align activity with DfE climate action themes, keep actions visible and create a more practical system for managing sustainability over time.
Your Plan May Include
Climate Action Planning for Multi-Academy Trusts
For multi-academy trusts, climate action planning brings added complexity. Trusts may need a shared sustainability strategy while supporting each school to create a plan that reflects its own buildings, site challenges, curriculum priorities and progress.
The Climate Action Management Platform helps trusts create consistency without removing local flexibility. It gives central teams a clear view of activity across the trust, while giving individual settings a practical route to action.
By keeping plans in one place, trusts can reduce duplication, improve visibility and make it easier to demonstrate progress.
From Understanding to Action
Understanding the DfE climate action plan requirements is the first step. The next is turning that understanding into a plan that can be used, updated and delivered.
This is where many schools and trusts get stuck. A document can explain what needs to happen, but a platform helps manage the doing.
The Climate Action Management Platform brings actions, responsibilities and progress together in one practical place. Whether you are creating your first plan or improving an existing one, it helps keep climate action clear, structured and visible.
Frequently Asked Questions
The platform helps schools and trusts create, manage, track and review their climate action plans in one place. It supports clearer ownership, better visibility, easier reporting and a more structured approach to sustainability planning.
A multi-academy trust may choose to have a trust-level climate action plan, individual school climate action plans, or both. A central platform can help trusts create a consistent structure while allowing each school to manage actions relevant to its own setting.
A DfE climate action plan for schools should consider key areas including adaptation and resilience, biodiversity and nature, climate education and green skills, and decarbonisation and net zero. It should also include clear actions, ownership, timescales and a way to monitor progress.
The Department for Education expects education settings to have a sustainability lead and a climate action plan. This includes schools, multi-academy trusts, colleges and other education settings in England.
A DfE climate action plan is a climate action plan developed in response to the Department for Education’s sustainability and climate change expectations for education settings. It helps schools, colleges and trusts take a structured approach to sustainability leadership and climate action.
A climate action plan is a structured plan that helps an organisation identify sustainability priorities, set actions, assign responsibility and track progress. For schools and trusts, it can cover areas such as decarbonisation, climate resilience, biodiversity, climate education and green skills.