Education for Sustainable Development

What was achieved in the DESD?

Roger Firth, Maggie Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315299211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

To integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning was the overarching goal of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). This, it was believed, would 'save the planet', encouraging behaviour changes to allow for the development of a more sustainable and just society for all. Awareness of sustainable development has risen enormously in recent years, challenging us, as individuals and as families, workplaces, and communities (both local and global), to think about and act upon the major issue which we face.

The Decade reaffirmed the United Nations' commitment to the crucial role of education and learning in the pursuit of sustainable development, and the need for far-reaching changes in the way education is often practised. Of course, the very idea that education should be for something (whether sustainable development or anything else), remains as questionable as ever. Nevertheless the instigation of the Decade clearly recognised the need for intensified efforts to achieve sustainable development.

This book reflects on the role and impact of the Decade in helping to reorient education towards sustainability, and looks forward, beyond the end of the Decade and its achievements, to contemplate the way ahead, giving special attention to case studies and the state of affairs in England. The authors offer different perspectives on the effectiveness and value of particular initiatives and practices that are responses to the Decade. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Curriculum Journal.

Developing the sustainable school: thinking the issues through

William Scott

This paper reports on a study that was a response to a call from the UK government’s Department of Children, Schools and Families for research into the link between the work of schools that address sustainability and the UK’s national sustainable development indicators. This was part of the government’s sustainable schools initiative, developed as a contribution to the UN’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. The paper uses the four capitals model of Herman Daly and Donella Meadows to critically examine, firstly, how a school might make such a contribution to sustainable development, and, then, how we might come to know how effectively this is progressing. In doing this, the paper builds on Webster’s work about the stages that a sustainable school might go through in its development, and the result is three sets of process descriptors to guide a school’s thinking about what it might do. These are presented in the sense of an embryonic and sketchy map to the terrain, rather than as a set of instructions or a detailed plan to follow.

Introduction

This paper reports research that was a response to a call in 2009 from the UK government’s Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) for investigations into the link between the work of schools that address sustainability and the UK’s national sustainable development indicators. Specifically, DCSF asked: How can we know what the development of sustainable schools is contributing to UK sustainable development? as part of its sustainable schools initiative which it established as a contribution to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD 2005–2014). The Decade aims to influence education to integrate the principles, values and practices of sustainable development. ESD (education for sustainable development) has come to be seen as a process of learning how to make decisions that consider the long-term future of the economy, ecology and equity of all communities; building the capacity for such futures-orientated thinking is a key educational task. Key features of ESD (UNESCO, 2005) are that it is based on sustainable development principles and values, and is locally relevant and culturally appropriate, such that it enhances civil capacity for environmental stewardship, social tolerance, and participation in community-based decision-making.

The research was carried out by the author and funded by the Government Office South West (GOSW), through the South West Learning for Sustainability Coalition (SWLSC) which is a loose federation of groups and individuals with interests in sustainability and learning. This paper is an edited version of the fuller, final research report.

The research built on a number of research studies, in particular: ESRC research carried out by the Universities of Lancaster and Bath [Natural Capital: metaphor, learning & human behaviour; 2004]; Anglo-German Foundation-funded research [Indicators of Progress in Education for Sustainable Development: the state of the art; 2006]; Specialist Schools and Academies Trust research [Raising Standards: making sense of the sustainable school; 2008]; evaluation studies of school development programmes in the south-west of England, funded by GOSW [2007–2009]; and a range of other UK studies on schools’ interpretation of ESD (Birney & Reed, 2009; Gayford, 2009; Porritt, Hopkins, Birney, & Reed, 2009).

The paper uses Daly and Meadows’ four capitals model to critically examine the idea of a school making a contribution to sustainable development. In doing this, it builds on Webster’s work (2004, 2009) about the stages that a sustainable school might go through in its development, and the result is three sets of descriptors that might guide a school’s thinking about what it wants to do. It is possible to see two sides to this coin: (1) a heuristic – a rather embryonic and sketchy map to the terrain left by those who’ve travelled part of the way and reflected on the journey; or (2) a set of instructions – a rather detailed and certain plan to be followed, and evaluated against. It is in the former sense that all that follows has been written. The paper begins with the introduction of terms and issues. Twelve descriptor texts then follow.

Mapping the ground

The UN Decade encourages schools to take sustainability seriously in what they do across buildings and grounds, in what they teach, and in how they link with local stakeholders. That is, across campus, curriculum and community, and it is clear that what schools do also needs to contribute to wider attempts to change social practice to more sustainable (or, at least, less unsustainable) ways of operating. In other words, what schools do, as social institutions, should make a contribution to wider efforts at sustainability.

Schools are not alone in having this expectation placed upon them as it now falls to all institutions: hospitals, banks, car dealerships, broadcasters, supermarkets, etc., to not only do something about sustainability, but also learn through doing this. Despite the encouragement of the Decade, the significance of this meta-level learning aspect to education for sustainable development (ESD) can be hard to appreciate, especially when so much emphasis is placed on changing behaviour with the need to understand, and build capacity, played down. Schools, however, along with colleges and universities, can be under no such illusions, as they have the extra imperative of remembering that their raison d’^ etre is to help young people learn about such matters. For these institutions, it seems clear that, if choices have to be made between helping young people learn and, say, saving carbon, then it is learning that needs to take priority. Fortunately, however, such stark choices do not need to be made, as each of these is most effective when viewed as complementary components. DCSF’s sustainable schools initiative understood this. See Scott (2010) and Vare and Scott (2007) for two explorations of this issue.

During the early years of the Decade, when this research was conducted,¹ for most schools engaged in the sustainable schools initiative, there were links to wider sustainability matters which were, superficially at least, fairly obvious. These included:

• The DCSF focus on eight sustainable schools doorways (including energy, water, travel, traffic, purchasing and waste) that linked to attempts to reduce resource and energy use and develop alternatives.
• DCSF’s Every Child Matters focus, and the elaboration on this by the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission: Every Child’s Future Matters.
• The focus on the global dimension, global citizenship and global learning, and on well-being, which connects to attempts to increase inter-cultural understanding and, more sharply, to decreasing poverty and enhancing quality of life, with links to the UN’s millennium development goals.
• Charity sector support for environmental education that is linked to international attempts to avoid species loss, habitat destruction, deforestation, and to enhance stewardship, and biodiversity more generally, and;
• The curriculum focus on citizenship with both in-school and school-community opportunities to practise the development of citizenly (action competence) capability.²

These foci map, albeit uneasily, onto a common way of thinking about sustainable development as requiring improvement in environmental, economic, and social spheres at the same time, with minimal trades-off between these, although this last condition is not always fully appreciated. In the next section, there is an exploration of the idea that a means of indicating development is necessary if we are to know something about what we are achieving, and if we are to be able to plan sensibly.

Progress sought: indicators needed

As Schumacher noted:

That which is good and helpful ought to be growing and that which is bad and hindering ought to be diminishing.… We therefore need, above all else…concepts that enable us to choose the right direction of our movement and not merely to measure its speed.³

Given the nature of the DCSF’s sustainable schools initiative (Reynolds & Scott, 2011), it is clear why government should want to be able to indicate the link between schools’ work and the country’s development, through policy and practice, of more sustainable ways of living. There are a number of dimensions to this, but two stand out, albeit for quite different reasons. One would give rise to external judgements, and the other to internal ones.

External
The external relates to national sustainable development indicators. The UK environment ministry, DEFRA,⁴ publishes a set of national sustainable development indicators which cover a very broad range of socioeconomic activity deemed to be germane to sustainability. Currently, there are two indicators (Nos. 47 & 48) directly focused on education. The first, ‘educational attainment’, is determined to be the proportion of 19-year-olds with level 2 qualifications and above. The second, ‘sustainable development education’, DEFRA notes, remains ‘to be developed’. This is still the case.

Evidence of sustainable development might be indicated by changes in three areas: (1) the review and re-orientation of education policies; (2) the building of personal and social capacity through leadership and educational programmes; and (3) the development of personal and social understanding and skills. Clearly, the last two of these link to what individual schools do, but only in a quite diffuse way, as any indicator will aggregate a set of judgements that will be arrived at externally, and made at the sector level, and will likely say nothing about how an individual school is faring in, or equally crucially, understanding, its own journey towards sustainability, and learning from this. This problem that DEFRA has of finding an indicator for ‘sustainable development education’ has been grappled with extensively. See Reid, Nikel, and Scott (2006) for a thorough review of the history of this development and its many pitfalls,⁵ and Di Giulio et al. (2012) for a more recent attempt to conceptualise ESD indicators for three German-speaking national contexts.

The most straightforward way of indicating that schools are doing something has been put forward by Dorset Local Authority and by Paul Vare, one of the UK’s members of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) indicator group. They independently proposed that the baseline indicator ought to be that schools have developed their own contextually appropriate indicator, and were actively monitoring this;⁶ a key distinction is that Vare proposed this as an indicator of learning in the broad domain of sustainability rather than an indicator for sustainable development per se. Clearly, an eco-school’s⁷ green flag might be thought of as one such indicator, but the fragmented view of sustainability which eco-schools presents, the way that success is possible without the whole-hearted involvement of the entire school, along with the relative ease with which such flags are obtained, mean that this will not, in and of itself, suffice. Neither will any of the increasing number of awards that are readily available for UK schools to collect.

Internal
The internal response relates to the ability of schools to be able to make such judgements for themselves about how they are progressing. As noted above, these will, one way or another, be related to how the institution understands the idea of sustainability, and the commitments that it has to being a sustainable school. There are a number of ways of addressing this.

This ability to track the development of practice across campus, community and curriculum is something that DCSF and others have taken seriously during the Decade. In the case of the DCSF, this was through the use of the s3 documentation which provided schools with a voluntary way to record and report their efforts to promote sustainable schools, as an integrated part of a self-evaluation process. Considerable thought went into the s3 and 108 separate descriptors resulted. It was handicapped, however, by being complex and hard to use, and also because it did not map well onto sustainability ideas (the lack of any reference to biodiversity was the most egregious example of this). Ultimately, the fragmentation of ideas made it not only hard to use, but also misleading, as learning was divorced from sustainability which was fractured into parts never to be put together again. But is it possible to draw on these ideas and produce something that is at once more whole and easier to use – whilst being complex enough to be meaningful? It is to this question that the paper now turns.

Beyond indicators: developing descriptors

One way forward is to think about stages⁸ that schools can go through in their institutional journey towards being more sustainable, and to approach this by drafting what are, in effect, progress descriptors which would have two linked functions: (1) as a way of gaining an understanding of progress made; and (2) as a means of scoping the next developmental steps that might be taken.

Building on Webster’s (2004) work, it was possible to outline broad stages in the development of a sustainable school. The following (stage model 1) was developed from work carried out for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust [SSAT] (SSAT, 2008) which drew on DCSF, National College, SSAT, and Government Office case studies of school practice, and on th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: As the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development comes to an end: what has it achieved and what are the ways forward?
• 1 Developing the sustainable school: thinking the issues through
• 2 Eco-schooling and sustainability citizenship: exploring issues raised by corporate sponsorship
• 3 Exploring and developing student understandings of sustainable development
• 4 Sustainable development, environmental education, and the significance of being in plac
• 5 Uncharted waters: voyages for Education for Sustainable Development in the higher education curriculum
• 6 A Practitioner’s Perspective – Missing the wood for the trees: systemic defects and the future of education for sustainable development
• Index