Ten Years of SE² #8 – Education, Education, Education

In the latest of our series of 10th Birthday Blogs, we share some insights from our experiences working with schools.

Thinking about sustainability in schools means thinking about schools as a system. Whilst each school is a unique combination of buildings, people and practice, they share a great deal in common.

They operate for roughly the same hours of the same weeks of the year. They are physical places where people come together for a shared activity (rather than virtual meeting places). And they are aiming to create well-informed young adults who are able to make choices about what they want to do next.

Many of them still form part of a three-part system of Government, local authorities and schools themselves, although most secondaries have now become Academies, removing some of the influence of that middle tier. Even for academies, a sense of belonging in a local neighbourhood or community remains strong.

So when we think about greater sustainability in schools, we need to take a systemic view. Changing something at one level may or may not have an impact on another. We see great examples of individual schools taking action to reduce their energy consumption but without a system-wide approach, they will only ever be pioneers and case studies, rather than the new normal.

The system-wide approach was crucial to the work we did with the Department for Education and the Sustainable Development Commission, to bring together Climate Change and Schools: A Carbon Management Strategy for the English Schools Estate. Necessarily a top-down document, the strategy looked at the many facets of schools that have an environmental impact - energy use, school travel, purchasing, use and disposal of products – and tried to identify opportunities for change at a system level.We also looked at who the best agents were to deliver that change, whether something should be driven by Government setting a national standard, or facilitated by local authorities across a geographic area, or through individual action by schools themselves.

Since producing the strategy in 2010, we have had the opportunity to put the theory into practice. We worked with the Carbon Trust on two schools carbon reduction programmes, where our role was to help build capacity within local authorities to engage local schools with carbon reductions, both educationally and operationally. A lot of schools’ behaviour change programmes are very classroom focused, but they risk missing the energy use that is not within pupils’ or teachers’ control (eg, catering, or weekend use of school buildings). We tried to broaden out the thinking and our outreach activities to bring in as many constituents as possible.

We then helped Carbon Trust to digitise some of its thinking, contributing to the Empower for Schools toolkit, which tracks down sources of carbon emissions and creates a system of pledges to help drive reductions.

To help schools, we worked with SE-Ed – an organisation that has continued to champion the fantastic Sustainable Schools Framework after it was set aside by Government – and produced a guide to financing energy efficiency and renewable energy in schools. This helped answer some of the common questions asked by schools about how to pay for works. With the advent of Feed-In Tariffs and the Renewable Heat Incentive, and the growth of energy services and Energy Performance Contracting models, we’d love to update the guide. We’re currently looking for sponsorship to help us do this – so get in touch if you would like to support us!

Most recently, we have been working on CREST, an EU-funded project hosted by Southend-on-Sea Borough Council, providing strategic advice to the Council on schools engagement, and working directly with schools to identify opportunities for carbon reductions and to facilitate change.

In amongst all of that sits the Atlas toolkit. It remains – as far as we know – the only carbon footprinting toolkit for schools that takes account of energy, travel and purchasing, giving an holistic footprint and the opportunity to compare with similar schools. Working with the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and a coalition of businesses including Arup, Philips and Skanska, we have developed toolkits for schools in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Poland, and we’re working with a number of schools in each country to test and refine the system. We would love to hear from schools, agencies, charities and others who would like to work with the Atlas toolkit to understand more about carbon footprints and actions to reduce them. The toolkit is free to download and use: visit www.atlasschools.org to find out more.

We have been privileged over the last few years to work at many levels throughout the schools system and with some incredibly passionate and committed people. There is still a lot to do: sustainability is still on the margins for many schools, where time pressures are powerful and the focus on exam performance is the major driver.

There’s a growing cohort of schools, however, who are adopting “sustainability where it makes sense”, so, for example, saving energy to cut costs, or increasing recycling to cut landfill liabilities. These are easy opportunities to replicate.

What is harder is the transformation of what and how we teach so that sustainable ways of living become the default for the future rather than the exception. Some schools will and do grasp this; many don’t. Most local authorities get it, but they are losing influence as the schools system changes. If we are to achieve system-wide change, it seems to fall to Government to take a much stronger position. So perhaps it comes back to others in the system to present a clear and irresistible ask of Government; perhaps it falls to all of us.