What does the Government want schools to do and is it achievable
Professor William Scott, Director of the Centre for Research in Education and the Environment at the University of Bath, provides some insight.

Background

The idea of sustainable development is not new. It has been around for over 30 years, and has come to widespread prominence through the Rio and Johannesburg world summits. It embodies the key idea that the way that humans are living threatens the planet's ability to support us. You will be very familiar with this in relation to:

• Resource depletion (raw materials and energy sources)
• Habitat destruction, species loss, pollution
• Over-fishing and over-grazing, and land degradation
• Climate change and global warming
• Poverty, disease and low life expectancy

Governments are committed, through international commitments, to addressing these issues. In Securing the Future (HMG 2005) the Government sets out its long-term aims for sustainable development in the UK. Its immediate priorities for action are:

• Sustainable consumption and production - achieving more with less.
• Natural resource protection and environmental enhancement - protecting the resources on which we depend.
• Sustainable communities - creating places where people want to live and work, now and in the future.
• Climate change and energy - confronting the greatest threat.

Although there is no mention of education here, it reperesnet the background to the profoundly significant Sustainable Schools Consultation of 2006.

The key features of the consultation

Sustainable Schools for pupils, communities and the environment, now simply called Sustainable Schools, began by setting out ambitious and challenging goals:

DfES has reaffirmed its commitment to sustainable development by publishing a two-year action plan to achieve outcomes to underpin a sustainable society. Schools are a key strand of this action plan and are invited to become models of sustainable development for their communities. This consultation paper seeks views from schools and their stakeholders on how we can work together to turn issues like climate change, global justice and local quality of life into engaging learning opportunities for pupils - and a focus for action among the whole school community.

The key ideas here are [i] the connection between action and learning: between what the school does, as a community, and what the people in it: pupils, staff, governors, can learn; and [2] the way that schools can model sustainable ways of working for the wider community. The links to Every Child Matters, through the principle that every child should have the opportunity to positively shape society, and their own future, are obvious.

The Prime Minister said this in 2004:
Sustainable development will not just be a subject in the classroom: it will be in its bricks and mortar and the way the school uses and even generates its own power.  Our students won't just be told about sustainable development, they will see and work within it: a living, learning place in which to explore what a sustainable lifestyle means.

Section 4 of the consultation put it more bluntly:
There are good reasons for schools to embrace sustainability, from improving pupil motivation to saving money.

The consultation paper set out a national framework for developing sustainable schools, through which every school was invited to consider its achievements so far and plan what more it could do over the longer term to help the government meet its 2020 sustainability targets. It also set out 8 aspects of the work of a school which it terms "sustainability themes" or "doorways" in which action could be taken, and learning occur:

• Food and drink
• Energy and water
• Travel and traffic
• Purchasing and waste
• Buildings and grounds
• Inclusion and participation
• Local well-being
• Global dimension

The doorway metaphor is a potentially powerful way of thinking about the task of creating a sustainable school, as each door provides a different opening onto a set of common challenges, and each has relevance for the major areas of school life: curriculum, campus, community.

Take Energy and Water. These topics are already features of the curriculum across the key stages, they are necessary (and increasingly costly) resources which schools have to buy, and their future availability as resources on a global scale are now under threat.  The argument for sustainable schools is that there is considerable scope for addressing the nature of these two resources, and their sourcing, processing, use (and re-use), both in the curriculum, and as real and necessary issues to be dealt with both locally (in the school and at home) and globally (both now and in future scenarios).

In this case, the win-win-win outcome that Sustainable Schools looks for is: [1] pupil learning that integrates academic, practical and ethical concerns; [2] reduced resource use by schools (and families) with financial savings; and [3] increased awareness of global issues around water and energy availability (now and in the likely future), with an enhanced motivation to get involved in action to address the issues (both locally and globally). And in doing all this, the school, as a community of interested citizens, becomes a model for similar action and learning elsewhere.

A similar set of arguments is made for each of the doorways in the consultation, and brief case studies are provided of schools setting out to explore these issues.  Each Doorway also has a DfES vision statement. The one for Travel and Traffic is:
By 2020 we would like all schools to be models of sustainable travel where vehicles are used only when absolutely necessary and facilities for healthier, less polluting or less dangerous modes of transport are exemplary.

Without doubt, this is a rich document which provides a challenging read no matter how much you know, or don't know, about sustainable development, or what you think the role of learning might be within this.
Responses to the consultation

There were 870 responses - a figure considerably in excess of the norm for DfES consultations. 347 of these were from students, 160 of whom were under 11. The report on the consultation contains quotes from both adults and young people and summarises the latter's views in this way:

• Frustration with the state of the environment in their communities, typically road danger, noise and pollution; vandalism, litter and graffiti; and destruction of nature for building/industry.
• Concern over anti-social behaviour, from racism to vandalism and litter, and a lack of respect demonstrated by young and old people alike.
• Concern at the continuing presence of poverty and injustice in the world, and the backdrop of war.
• Anger at the careless use of natural resources at the expense of future (their) generations; unthinking pollution militating against their quality of life; and a sense that adults are disinterested in the issues.

Much of this report is taken up with a further consideration of the DfES's sustainable schools strategy in the light of the consultation; some ideas are repeated; others built on. There's a quote from Alan Johnson which re-emphasises the action - learning - modelling point that's at the heart of the Sustainable Schools idea:

Schools are there to give children the knowledge and skills they need to become active members of society. Many children are rightly worried about climate change, global poverty and the impact of our lifestyles. Schools can demonstrate ways of living that are models of good practice for children and their communities. They can build sustainable development into the learning experience of every child to encourage innovation and improvement.

The report re-emphasises a point made in the consultation, that a sustainable school is one that is guided by the principle of care for oneself, each other (across cultures,  distances and time), and the environment (both far and near).  The report repeats the idea that Doorways represent different ways of approaching the task of building a sustainable school, noting that most schools are already working on one or more of these even if they don't recognise them as sustainable development.

Looking ahead - what is being asked of schools?

The DfES has designated 2007 as a Year of Action, by the end of which it hopes that:

• All schools will have received information about the sustainable schools strategy.
• At least 60% of schools will have addressed the goals of the strategy in their school development plans.
• 90% of schools taking action on sustainable development will consider that the action has had, or will have had, a measurable impact on the pupils' knowledge and understanding of sustainability issues and/or improved the schools' environmental performance.

TeacherNet provides further details of initiatives in the Year of Action.  These include:

• Assembly plans with suggestions on how to profile sustainability within school assemblies, and open a dialogue about these issues with pupils and staff.
• A self-evaluation tool (s3) designed to help schools evaluate their current efforts to create a sustainable school.  This uses the headings in Ofsted's SEF, thus linking sustainability with school improvement.
• A resource pack featuring schemes of work from the Foundation Stage to post-16. The schemes are based on the eight doorways with links to national curriculum subjects.
• The 2006-7 teaching awards programme will include an award for sustainable development, open to all schools.
• A detective kit package of resources for Key Stage 2 and 3 pupils to help them investigate the sustainability performance of their own school and develop practical suggestions for staff and governors on moving forward.
• Online pupil conferences in cooperation with WWF and Global Learning Communities.
• A change the world competition where pupils will be invited to come up with their own suggestions and ideas.

Is it feasibile?

One very positive feature of Sustainable Schools is that it has been written in a way to help governors, heads and teachers relate readily to its structure and language; the use of familiar doorway labels such as food, energy, water, travel, waste etc., means that the language of the framework is not only already familiar to schools, it also maps squarely onto many recent policy foci: school meals / climate change / citizenship / inclusion / etc. The DfES hopes, of course, that schools will see in this framework much of what they do already, and be encouraged to continue with this, and do more, with, perhaps, every head teacher then being able to echo the colleague profiled in the consultation paper who is quoted as saying:

We didn't realise we were doing sustainable development until somebody told us.  We were just trying to meet the needs of our children.

There is, however, considerable scope for misunderstanding what is at stake here.  Being able to use the sustainable schools framework, with its familiar language, to be able to say that schools are now addressing sustainable development has obvious attractions for government as it has to report on progress in these matters. 

However, there must be more to it than this, otherwise schools can just carry on doing what they do now.  For example, there has to be a difference between, on the one hand, addressing each doorway through the curriculum (the easy bit), linking this with purposeful activities in the school and community with tangible pay-back through, for example, lower water bills (more difficult to do), and on the other to have all this lead to student capability to respond to the challenges everyone will face in sustainable development. 

And what lies at the heart of this capability? The DfES suggest that:
Sustainable development means inspiring people in all parts of the world to find solutions that improve their quality of life without storing up problems for the future, or impacting unfairly on other people's lives. It must be much more than recycling bottles or giving money to charity. It is about thinking and working in a profoundly different way.

This idea of 'thinking and working in a profoundly different way' is crucial and has profound implications for what schools should do, if they are to take it seriously.  For example, should schools focus on:

[1] facilitating change in our ability to deal with the problems of the present, and how we live now, by promoting particular behaviours and ways of thinking, where the need for this has been clearly identified and agreed.

We might term this learning for sustainable development where education's role in sustainable development is a broadly instrumental one of passing on 'what works' to the next generation.
Or should they focus on:

[2] facilitating change in our ability to deal with an uncertain and unknown future by building students' capacity to think critically about [and beyond] what is known now and what experts say, and to test out sustainable development ideas.

We might term this learning as sustainable development where education's role in sustainable development is seen as promoting a social learning process of improving the human condition - a process which can be continued indefinitely without undermining itself.

In reality, both foci are needed.  The first is important for two reasons: there are clear benefits to organisations, families, and individuals to be had in the short term, as well as wider environmental and social benefits; and we just have to do the obvious things - for example, there are few good arguments against insulating roof spaces.  But, of course, not everything's as simple as insulation.  This takes us to the second focus and, because we shall need to think and work in profoundly different ways, we also need to be able to engage with the difficult questions that we don't yet fully understand. 

Focus 2 not only complements Focus 1, it makes it meaningful, because our long term future will depend less on our compliance in being trained to do the 'right' thing now, and more on our capability to analyse, to question alternatives and to make our own decisions when we need to.

Focus 2 involves the development of learners' abilities to make sound choices in the face of the inherent complexity and uncertainty of the future, because by learning throughout our lives we equip ourselves to choose most advantageously as the future unfolds.

Schools can work on Focus 2 by recognising and acting on the very many tensions that surround sustainable development.  These include:

• How can sustainable development be achieved, is it impossible to achieve because development (i.e. economic growth on the Western global-capitalist model) cannot be sustained?
• Should as much food and drink as possible be locally sourced; or should we continue to bring it from all over the world through trade with other countries?
• Should we promote free trade or fair trade in what we buy at school and home?
• Should schools emphasize recycling and the composting of waste, or should they try not to create waste in the first place?
• Should parents be free to drive their cars up to the school gates, or should pupils have to walk or use public transport?

And so on - the list is long.

So, it's not just the eight doorways that matter but the tensions you encounter when you go through them, and a school that doesn't raise these in what it does with its pupils, is missing much of the point about sustainable development, and losing valuable opportunities for learning.

A Final Point

It seems to me that the DfES is encouraging schools to have an outward-looking and future-focused curriculum that enable children to engage in open-ended ways with the hugely significant debates that are happening in the wider-world, the outcomes of which will surely affect their lives.  This is an educational vision worthy of the challenge presented by sustainable development.

William Scott
Centre for Research in Education and the Environment