Education: information for students and teachers
Photo: A sign made of beach trash. Photo by Jonathan Sloan courtesy of US Marine Corps and DVIDS.
Last updated: 17 May 2025.
Want to know about rivers, water, or pollution? You've come to the right place! We've been developing a range of educational material for teachers and students since 1998. We do a little bit more each year. We hope you find it useful.
Pollution
- Introduction to water pollution: What are the causes and effects of water pollution? What are the solutions?
- Pollution photos: 50 free, public-domain photos you can use in your school and college projects.
Rivers
- Introduction to rivers: What is a river and how does it flow from source to sea?
- River photos: 50 free, public-domain photos you can use in your school and college projects.
- River and Category: Rivers are good places to start for Creative Commons licensed pics on Wikimedia Commons.
If you're looking for photos of British rivers, one of the best places we've found is the superb (but slightly oddly named) Flickr pool River Names of Britain: it's a collection of over 33,000 photos of British rivers posted by over 1300 people.
Climate change
- Climate change and rivers: How will global warming affect rivers?
- Climate change and global warming photos: 50 free, public-domain photos you can use in your school and college projects.
Helpful guides
- How to run a local community campaign
- Balloon releases: pollution factsheet: Text of an old leaflet by the Marine Conservation Society about the damaging impacts of balloon race events.
Older pages
These older pages from our website are badly in need of an update, which we hope to do soon.
- The state of our rivers and seas: handy statistics and graphs
- Adopting a river: How to get out get dirty, and make a difference
- Using environmental law to stop damaging developments: Advice from Charlie Hopkins on how to challenge environmentally destructive planning permission.