Whether you’re just leaving school and heading into the animal sector, or you’ve been working in it for years and you’re wondering what the next generation of candidates knows when they walk through your door, it’s worth taking a look at what schools are actually teaching.

The answer is: some things, but not enough.

What the curriculum covers

At primary level, science includes basic biology: living things and their habitats, animal life cycles, food chains. Children learn that animals need food, water and shelter. It’s a decent foundation, but it’s broad.

At secondary, GCSE Biology covers cell biology, genetics, evolution, ecosystems and animal physiology. Students who take it will learn how bodies work at a cellular level, how species adapt, and how ecosystems are structured. These are genuinely useful concepts if you go into conservation, veterinary science or research.

GCSE Animal Care and Management exists as a vocational qualification covering animal health, behaviour, nutrition and handling. Not every school offers it, but where it is available it gives students a much more grounded introduction to working with animals than academic biology alone. At A Level, Biology goes deeper into the same territory. Agriculture qualifications, available at some colleges and sixth forms, bring in livestock management, land use and animal husbandry. Animal Management at BTEC level covers species-specific care, welfare legislation and basic anatomy.

What’s missing

Here’s where the gap opens up. Very little of the national curriculum addresses animal welfare in any meaningful way. Students learn that animals have biological needs. They don’t necessarily learn what poor welfare looks like, what the law says about it, or what the sector of people working to protect animals actually does.

According to the RSPCA’s 2024 Kindness Index, 89% of the UK population believe there are benefits to including animal welfare in the school curriculum. Despite this, welfare as a subject remains absent from standard national curriculum content in England.

The welfare and rescue sector, the training and behaviour sector, the work done by animal charities, the role of inspectors and enforcement officers, the work of sanctuary staff: none of this features in standard school education. Most young people arrive at the idea of working in animal welfare through personal experience or stumbling across an organisation they admire. Rarely through anything that happened in a classroom.

Careers guidance in schools doesn’t help much either. Teachers and advisers are generally good at signposting routes into medicine, law, engineering and the arts. Animal careers tend to get collapsed into “vet or farmer” with little recognition of the dozens of other roles that exist.

It’s also worth noting that the government is currently consulting on a new Natural History GCSE – a sign that the gap is at least being recognised at policy level, even if the changes won’t reach classrooms for several years. If you work in the sector and want to have your say, the consultation is open until 4 September 2026 at gov.uk/government/consultations/gcse-natural-history-proposed-subject-content.

If you’re just starting out

If you’re leaving school or college and heading into the animal sector, the formal education system will have given you some of what you need. Biology and animal management qualifications provide real grounding. But the curriculum alone won’t show you the full picture of what’s possible.

That means you’ll likely need to fill in the gaps yourself. Work experience, volunteering, following organisations you’re interested in, and reading around the sector all help. The people who tend to build careers with animals are usually the ones who didn’t wait for school to teach them everything.

If you’re still in education and you have access to animal management or agricultural qualifications, they’re worth taking seriously. They’re not easier options than academic routes. They’re different routes, and for some careers they’re the more direct one.

If you’re already working in the sector

If you’re an experienced professional or you manage a team, this gap in education is probably something you’ve felt rather than thought about explicitly. The school leavers and new graduates who come to you for work experience or entry-level roles often arrive enthusiastic but with limited awareness of welfare legislation, handling protocols, or what day-to-day reality looks like.

That’s not a reflection on them. It’s a reflection on what they were taught.

Knowing this can help you shape how you approach onboarding, what you include in volunteer or work experience programmes, and how much patience you extend to candidates who clearly have the instinct for the work even if they don’t yet have the knowledge. The curriculum they went through wasn’t designed to prepare them for your industry. That preparation starts with you.

The bigger picture

There’s a reasonable argument that animal welfare should feature more prominently in education, not just as biology but as ethics, citizenship and career awareness. Wales has already introduced a module on empathy and animal welfare into its curriculum. England has been slower to follow.

There are signs that is changing. In June 2026, the government announced a new Natural History GCSE, currently out for consultation, which will cover three core areas: habitats and wildlife in the UK, human influence on the natural world, and climate change, biodiversity loss and conservation. It will include a minimum of 20 hours of fieldwork, giving students hands-on experience in real habitats. The qualification is designed with green careers in mind, with around 900 UK businesses in nature-related sectors supporting 21,000 jobs and raising £2.8 billion in 2025.

The government has also announced new V Levels in Agriculture, Environmental and Animal Care, set to launch in 2029.

These are meaningful steps. But the Natural History GCSE is still at consultation stage, the V Levels are years away, and animal welfare specifically remains absent from the core curriculum. The gap described in this post exists now, for the young people entering the sector today.

A revised national curriculum is expected to be published in 2027, for first teaching in 2028. If the Natural History GCSE and V Levels are implemented as planned, the picture for school leavers entering animal careers in the early 2030s could look quite different. For now, the curriculum is what it is. Knowing its limits is a useful starting point, whether you’re just entering the sector or you’ve been part of it for years.