LOMLOE is the first Spanish education law to write sustainability into the curriculum as something every subject carries rather than something the science department absorbs. The exit profile expects a pupil leaving compulsory education to be able to act on it, not merely describe it. I think that is right. I also think it landed on teachers with almost no material attached, which is a different problem from a philosophical one and it is the one I keep hearing about in staff rooms.
The gap is practical. A competency written across the curriculum needs an object that every subject can hold. Climate as a topic is too big and belongs to nobody. Recycling as a topic is small enough to teach but it has been taught to these children since infantil and they are bored of it. What is missing is something concrete, present in the room, and complicated enough to reward a second look.
Why a garment beats a topic
The polo shirt a pupil is wearing has a composition label, a country of manufacture, a care symbol and a price their family paid. Behind it sits a farm, a mill, a dyehouse, a factory, a shipping route and a set of certificates that may or may not exist. That is a supply chain the child is literally inside. It is also, usefully, not an abstraction anyone can nod along to: when you ask a class where their shirt came from, nobody knows, and not knowing is a much better start to a lesson than knowing.
Three low-prep learning situations
The first takes twenty minutes and needs nothing. Everyone reads the label in their own shirt and the class builds a table: fibre percentages, country of manufacture, wash temperature. Then the maths. What proportion of the class is wearing something more than half synthetic. How many countries are represented. Which wash temperature appears most often and what it costs to run. It is a data set the class generated from their own bodies, which is why they argue about it.
The second takes a lesson. Split the class into the stages of the chain: field, spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting and sewing, transport, shop, wardrobe, bin. Each group has to find out one thing about their stage and one thing they cannot find out. Then they present both. The second list is the important one, and I would give it equal time, because a pupil who can say precisely what is not knowable about their own clothing has understood more than one who has memorised a water statistic.
The third runs over weeks and costs a stamp. The class writes to the uniform supplier with three questions: where was the fibre grown, which production run is our order from, and what certificates cover it. Whatever comes back gets read aloud. A full answer teaches how traceability works. A vague answer teaches something arguably more valuable, which is what an unsubstantiated claim looks like when it arrives in your own hands. From September 2026, vague environmental claims are unlawful in the EU under consumer rules already adopted, so this is not an academic exercise. It is the standard the supplier is about to be held to.
What I would not do
I would not ask children to audit their families. Uniform is a budget decision made under pressure, and a project that ends with a pupil interrogating a parent about what they bought is a project that shames the households with least room to choose. Keep the object of study institutional: the school's supplier, the school's policy, the school's lost property. Nobody's home is on trial.
I would also not promise a tidy conclusion. In the classrooms where I have watched this go well, the ending was not a pledge or a poster. It was a class that had learned to ask a supplier a specific question and to notice when the answer was not one. That is the competency, and it does not need a new textbook. It needs the shirt they are already wearing.