Black Mountains College

The mission of Black Mountains College is ‘learning to live in a warming world.’ We are a new institution dedicated to teaching skills relevant for an uncertain and changing current systems. We see the climate crisis as a result of deeper structural, cultural, and economic problems. Tackling these issues calls for new skills, new ways of thinking and new ways of seeing. We promote creativity, and fresh ways of organising knowledge, communities, and action.

We offer Further Education Diploma courses, various short courses and residential camps, and a degree programme - BA (Hons) Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change. 

Our learning model, applied across all our courses, integrates the head, hands and heart, multi-sensory protocols, outdoor learning and multiple hierarchies of knowledge or ways of knowing.

Learning in context, on the land, in ecosystems, within economies and social structures and organisations is what applied, experiential and problem-based learning is all about. All our courses acknowledge the forest school principle that re-connection to nature begins with making nature itself the classroom. Studies have shown that outdoor learning correlates with enhanced learning outcomes, well-being, concentration, behaviour, memory, and confidence.