More than 100 teachers, academics and students have blocked traffic and staged mock climate classes outside the Department for Education in a protest against the underplaying of environmental problems in the national curriculum.

The demonstrators – who carried Teach the Truth, Rebel for Life and Climate: More Important Than Brexit banners – urged the government to make the climate and ecological crisis an educational priority.

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The protest organised by the Extinction Rebellion group, which has been taking place during the half-term holiday, was also a show of solidarity for 10,000 pupils who missed classes last Friday to express their frustration at the world’s failure to reduce emissions, inspired by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who staged the first school strike.

The organiser, Tim Jones, a secondary school teacher from Lewisham in south-east London, told the gathering that the education system was failing to address the complex reality of climate change and biodiversity loss. He said: “The current system teaches children to conform, not to question things. This conformity breeds the denial that is exacerbating the problems. What we need now is action. That’s what we have seen from children and students and that is now what we need from adults.”

Play Video 0:27 'Teach the truth': teachers and students join together in climate protests - video

The protesters met at Old Palace Yard in Westminster and marched to the DfE offices on Great Smith Street. They blocked the road and heard speeches from Prof David Humphreys of the Open University, Dr Anne Andrews of the University of Cambridge and Dr Alison Green, a former pro vice-chancellor of Arden University who recently organised a letter signed by more than 200 academics in support of the Youth 4 Climate Strike.

The teachers and students performed a pantomime lesson, with mock chairs and desk, and heaps of chalk, to highlight the curriculum’s light coverage of a topic that will shape the lives of young people.

The protesters claimed the UK government had failed to live up to the Paris agreement in which it pledged to enhance education on climate change. They said climate change was treated, at best, as a peripheral subject and that the weak emphasis on the topic meant some state students could go through all 11 years of compulsory education with just 10 classes on climate change out of a total of more than 10,000.

“Sometimes I wonder, what’s the point of teaching when no one is teaching the truth about the future?” said Andrew Thompson, a 33-year-old teacher.

Green said she was speaking on behalf of fellow academics in expressing solidarity with the student strikers. “Like them, I fear for the future of the planet,” she said. “Young people are striving at school to gain qualifications to fulfil personal goals and aspirations. They trust the government but the government is letting them down and squandering their future.”

The DfE said climate change was included in the curriculum. The education secretary, Damian Hinds, has criticised the young strikers. He said: “Missing class won’t do a thing to help the environment; all they will do is create extra work for teachers.”

Many were inspired by students. Edmund Stubbs, a secondary school science teacher based in east London, wrote in the Guardian: “Seeing young people abandon their studies for a day and claim to be taking their future into their own hands should make any teacher uneasy and it has led me to question my role as a secondary school science teacher.”

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The demonstration is the latest in a wave of climate protests that are disrupting an increasingly wide range of locations and institutions.

On Monday, dozens of Extinction Rebellion activists held up traffic outside a London fashion event. In December, the BBC’s central London headquarters was put on lockdown after campaigners rallied outside to demand the national broadcaster declare a “climate and ecological emergency”.

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More than 100 Extinction Rebellion activists were arrested in November when protesters blocked five London bridges and glued themselves to the doors of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. There have also been demonstrations outside the Scottish parliament and in the centre of Manchester.

Extinction Rebellion, which started in the UK less than a year ago, now has groups in dozens of countries and plans to stage a week of disruption from 15 April.