Education for Sustainable Development: Listening to the next generation

The environmental cause is consequently playing into many aspects of young people’s lives; To how, and what, they want from their education, including the knowledge and skills they are gaining, to expectations around what their educational institutions are doing to reduce climate change, and to gaining an understanding of the jobs and employers they will move into. To other aspects of their lives, such as how people consume and shop, for instance Gen Z (those born from around late 1990s to early 2010s) in the UK are 1.4 times likely to pay a premium for eco-friendly products (YouGov, 2020).

What young people want from their future

Aside from providing them with an income, many people look for meaning and purpose in their work. Indeed, recent surveys of final year students and recent graduates by Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK) found that a sense of meaning and satisfaction from work was the most important factor when considering what job to apply for, coming in front of a good salary/financial benefits (SOS-UK, 2017). Furthermore, this desire for a sense of meaning was significantly more important for those aged 26 and under. The study also found that 57% of final year graduates and 52% recent graduates mentioned ‘Having a positive impact on the world’ as being important when applying for a job.

An organisation’s sustainability strategy is therefore likely to play an increasing role within their recruitment process. A study by TotalJobs (Murray-Nevil, 2019) discovered that a quarter (26%) of workers would be willing to take a pay cut to work for a company working towards protecting the environment. In practice, they found workers were willing to accept a salary reduction of over £8,000 on average per annum to take up an environmentally friendly role. This finding is amplified for the younger workers, finding that Millennial workers were willing to drop their salaries by an average of £11,400.

However, preparing for a future that helps to tackle climate change goes beyond the jobs that young people will do. Following a process of consultation with young people involving more than 300 people across the UK, Our Bright Future (Nash, 2020) found young people wanted three key changes for them and the environment; As well as ‘support to get environmental jobs’, young people also want ‘more time spent learning in and about nature’ and ‘government, employers, businesses, schools and charities to pay more attention to the needs of young people and the environment’. This suggests that education establishments need to be supported to develop their curriculum and pedagogies which include learning in and about the environment, as well as support for their staff to provide the up to date and relevant careers information, advice and guidance to their students.

This preparation for a more sustainable world, including greener jobs, starts in education. But are young people being adequately prepared for this?

Universities

Universities are in a strong position to address some of the challenges around sustainability, not just through their teaching practice, but also through their research, their public engagement activities and - given that they are usually such large institutions - responsible campus operations. Many universities are aligning their practices to bring about the sustainable changes our world needs. Since 2019 Times Higher Education (THE) have been running the THE Impact Rankings which assess and compare universities’ performance against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), creating an additional motivator for universities to make real impact. And the majority of students seems to agree with this role of the university – the Student Pulse survey (THE, 2021) found 79% of students think universities have an important role to play in achieving the United Nations’ SDGs.

In this year’s Student Academic Experience Survey by HEPI/Advance HE (Neves & Hewitt, 2021) students were asked ‘Which areas of university spend are the most reasonable use of tuition fees?’. Even after a year of turmoil around some students wishing to get refunds from their fees, a quarter of respondents (25%) selected that they wanted their university to spend on transitioning the institution towards sustainability – a new category introduced only in this latest year of the survey. In fact, when the question of tuition fees is not considered, SOS’s survey of college and university students found that 80% want their institution to be doing more on sustainable development (SOS-UK, 2021a).

Students at both colleges and universities do also expect their institutions to support their development of sustainability skills as part of their courses. Those agreeing this to be the case has grown slightly from 76% of students in 2015-16, to now 81% of students expecting this. A number of skills and competencies can be associated with education for sustainable development. SOS-UK set out 12 key skills shown in Figure 1.

Colleges

When thinking about colleges, vocational courses tend to be more closely aligned with industry needs, and more now than ever, business and industry require FE to equip their learners with the competencies and skills needed to contribute to the sustainability of organisations and to prepare them to move into green jobs. As Dora Martínez Carbonell from West Suffolk College emphasises: ‘In FE, we must bring sustainability expert voices onboard to advise course directors on how best to embed sustainability into their programmes.’ (2021). For instance, colleges should be including local businesses so as to better understand their skill needs to contribute to college planning and course development.

The Guide for Sustainability in Further Education produced by the Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education advises that education for sustainable development should be interdisciplinary and holistic – it should be embedded in the whole curriculum, not as a separate subject. It should also include critical thinking and problem solving, which leads to students developing confidence in addressing the dilemmas and challenges of sustainable development. Furthermore, education for sustainable development should be fostered through a variety of pedagogies, such as through art, drama, debate and experience.

Schools

Sustainable education and skills development needs to be embedded and developed from an early age and therefore schools must play this vital role in supporting this. At this earlier age, young people are still keen to learn about the environment and how to do more to support sustainable development. Currently, just over half (58%) of pupils (from Year 5 up to sixth form) say they have learnt lots or quite a bit about the environment at their current school or college. Yet, 71% are interested in learning more about the environment (SOS-UK, 2021b).

It’s not just the pupils who wish to be learning more about environmental issues, teachers also want to see more change towards teaching climate change. Sixty-nine percent of primary and secondary school teachers think there should be more teaching in UK schools about climate change, its implications for environments and societies around the world and how these implications can be addressed (Teach the Future, 2021). Many teachers (41%) however state that climate change is rarely or never mentioned in their schools. Where it is currently mentioned however, this tends to primarily be limited to science and geography lessons (ibid.). Climate change does and will affect all aspects of young people’s lives and needs to be linked across the curriculum not in a narrow range of subject silos.

One of the issues holding back incorporating more sustainability-focussed teaching is that most teachers (70%) feel they have not received adequate training to educate students on climate change and its implications (Teach the Future, 2021). Another reason can be attributed to recent changes to the curriculum, particularly those made to KS3, GCSE and A level curricula in 2014/15, which included the removal of assessment methods such as coursework and practicals, and a full move to end of course exams. It also included the introduction of the EBacc, narrowing KS4 pupils’ course choices to the detriment of creative, artistic, and technical subjects. Research (Kashefpakdel et al., 2018) with teachers after these changes found that they believed that it has resulted in fewer opportunities to develop valuable skills that are important for good education for sustainable development, such as creativity and team working skills. One teacher explained: “[The] school ethos has changed enormously so that didactic teaching is expected, potentially due to enormous subject knowledge required. Creativity and independent thinking has been completely scrapped from lessons.” (Science teacher) (p.44).

Moving forward

Students need to be equipped with a range of knowledge, skills, and values in order to be better prepared for a more sustainable future and for jobs that promote sustainability. We have seen many schools, colleges and universities integrate sustainability into the core of their education to inspire and equip young people for the future. For instance, problem or project-based leaning approaches which can equip students with the real world knowledge of contemporary issues but also equips them with the critical and problem solving skills, and creative thinking skills needed to find solutions to problems. These pedagogies can also develop the communication skills needed to explain and persuade audiences, so as to share messages effectively about the challenges of climate change. Yet, currently only 7% of teachers have reported that climate change is a core part of their problem based approaches in lessons across the curriculum (Teach the Future, 2021). Ultimately our teachers and educators need to be supported and empowered to teach for a strong sustainable education, whether this be through support for curriculum development, continued professional development opportunities, support to develop links with industry, and through initial teacher training.