Leading sustainability in schools

Introduction

What is the role of schools, and more specifically school leadership, in the transition to a sustainable future for humankind? What different forms of leadership are needed in order to enable this role?

In this article, I will explore the nature, challenges and opportunities of sustainability leadership within the context of formal education in the UK. A critical pedagogy lens (Freire, 1970; Gatto, 1992) is used to explore ways in which the formal education system is constructed on mental models that are inherently unsustainable and which reinforce the principles of hierarchy, power and control, separation, and competition that are at the root of our sustainability challenges. Core values and empowerment are central to sustainable leadership (Waters in the foreword to Sander and Blair, 2011); I argue that the education system is based on unsustainable values and may be viewed as an instrument for inculcating teachers and learners into the societal norms of conformity, subjugation of individuals as consumers and workers, reinforcing a paradigm in which exploitation of resources (be they human or non-human) enables economic development. The forms of leadership that are created within this system are unsustainable, relying upon – and reinforcing – an understanding of progress which is antithetical to the solutions that are required if humankind is to achieve a sustainable, peaceful future. A school leader’s role as a change agent for sustainability can be manifest in a number of spheres of influence: in the teaching, learning and curriculum; in their leadership of the school as an organisation; and in their relations with the wider community. I will conclude by exploring possibilities for educational leadership in these spheres which have potential to challenge some of these systemic root causes of unsustainability.

For those of us engaged in promoting sustainability learning, it is clear that the issue has never been more pressing. The effects of climate change are clear; summer arctic sea-ice is likely to have disappeared within decades, occurrences of extreme weather events will increase worldwide, and the World Bank predicts that the number of people living in regions with ‘absolute water scarcity’ will almost double – to 2.8 billion – by 2025 (World Bank, 2009). The question of what is driving the impending global catastrophe is no longer debatable; 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is driven by human activity, through our increasing burning of fossil fuels to meet growing energy demands (Cook et al., 2013).

These are huge and complex issues, and to address them requires a commensurate effort. In their book The Burning Question, Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark (2013) use the metaphor of a train with three carriages: extraction (of fossil fuels from the earth), combustion and consumption, each of which is tightly coupled to the next, and hurtling downhill at breakneck speed. ‘To have the best chance of cutting emissions,’ they argue, ‘it’s clear that efforts are needed to apply the brakes to all three carriages at once’ (Berners-Lee and Clark, 2013), meaning that action at government and corporate levels is required as well as an immense shift in patterns of consumption, especially in richer countries.

Education for sustainability

Education for sustainability (EfS) ‘embraces environmental concerns as well as issues such as the fight against poverty, gender equality, human rights, cultural diversity, and education for all’, said the UN, at the end of the Decade for Sustainable Development (2004–14). Until a few years ago, the UK education system had a progressive Sustainable Schools Strategy, championed by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which supported schools to provide a holistic approach to EfS that encompassed learning about, and for, environmental sustainability and social justice. This approach was based on participatory learning approaches aimed at empowerment, critical thinking and active global citizenship. Education reforms since 2010 have brought about not only the end of the Sustainable Schools Strategy, but also a significant narrowing of the national curriculum, which now focuses on core subjects such as literacy and maths with no reference at all to sustainable development in the primary curriculum. Teachers, however, are imaginative and dedicated, and many schools are still ‘doing’ EfS. But, given ever-present external pressure exerted by inspection and the standards agenda, increasing accountability of individual school leaders, and the fact that our curriculum no longer promotes education about sustainability, let alone for sustainability, or as sustainability, what role can schools effectively play in enabling their learners to take an active role in creating a sustainable future?

Tensions in the education system

The current education system seen in English schools began to develop soon after the start of the industrial revolution and, despite tweaks at the edges, would still be recognisable by the clerics, philanthropic industrialists and politicians who were influential in the establishment of state schooling. While there are not many who would disagree that universal access to free education is a ‘Good Thing’, it is worth considering that the purpose of education at the time was to ensure an effective and productive labour force in order to maintain Britain’s position as a global economic power. Ken Robinson’s very popular TED Talk illustrates the ways in which our education mirrors its industrial roots: ¹ ‘ringing bells, separate facilities, specialised into separate subjects…educat[ing] children in “batches”‘. But there is another, more insidious, dimension which schools have inherited from the system’s post-industrialisation roots and that is the hierarchical power structures of monitoring, inspection, bureaucracy, control and assessment.

In the early 20th century, the American industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor, 1911) which laid out his production efficiency methodology: fragmenting tasks into the smallest possible measurable part, minimising skill requirements (and therefore training time) amongst workers, measuring individuals’ output in minute detail and rewarding or disciplining accordingly. This approach, though at the time received with caution by a US House of Representatives Committee because it reduced workers to mindless, disempowered followers and gave a dangerously high level of control to managers, has provided a blueprint for modern organisations – including schools – and it is a system that is almost invisible to us because of its pervasiveness. Most pertinent to the challenges posed by sustainability, this blueprint is predicated upon an assumption that people and planet are framed as resources to be managed, measured, controlled and exploited in the service of profit.

It is for school leaders to challenge this paradigm within their own learning communities and many do. Rather than take on the role of all-powerful, heroic or charismatic leader (which is unsustainable on a personal level as well as helping to reinforce the narrative of power and control), they can focus on the three functions of leading sustainably: distributing responsibility so that teachers and learners can explore, challenge and enquire; creating conditions that empower rather than control; and enabling children to flourish as capable, inquisitive, connected, compassionate decision-makers. In schools where this is happening, education as sustainability can flourish. But it is happening in spite of, not because of, the policy and practice contexts of our education system.

A ‘root cause’ of the sustainability challenge is the tension inherent in a formal education sector which is centrally controlled, in which compulsory curriculum is determined by the political party of the moment, in which quality of teaching and learning is externally enforced through a bureaucratic and punitive inspection regime and which is based on a ‘banking’ model (Freire, 1970) whereby ‘experts’ deposit knowledge into children’s minds like blank pages. This is an important pre-cursor to the second problem, which is what leadership for sustainability might look like within this system.

The ideas of critical leadership studies, which challenge the one dimensional quest for a set of traits or qualities that characterise effective leaders in corporate organisations, highlighting the sinister nature of dominant forms and conceptualisations of leadership, are echoed by similar commentators in the education sector. Fullan (2005) suggests that the most ‘egregious error is to search for the superleader’ because by attributing the success or failure of a school to one charismatic individual, staff may become over-reliant on leadership, disempowered, inducing a kind of ‘learned helplessness’ (Gemmill and Oakley, 2011), and consequently the changes that have been implemented during that individual’s tenure are often lost once they leave. Despite this, the ‘super head’ as a solution to failing schools in deprived areas was introduced during the last Labour government and has continued since. Fullan (2001) reconceptualises education as a complex tri-level system, and distributed leadership as the key driver for change. Bennett et al.’s (2003) description of distributed leadership ‘as an emergent property of a group or network of interacting individuals’ implies a more democratic and co-owned model of leadership, but despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that distributed leadership is now a common concept within formal education, it is still the target of critique, seen as part of the normative discourse and ‘little more than a smokescreen to provide an illusion of consultation for new-managerialist strategies’ (Torrance, 2013). Certainly, school leadership in general seems to have become the subject of considerable fetishism in recent years, with a ‘period of rampant adjectival leadership’ ensuing under new Labour (Gunter, 2012).

In exploring the relevance of these issues, I was interested in finding out about the lived experience of head teachers. I carried out an informal interview with the headteacher of a rural primary school, to explore the ways in which my respondent understood and articulated his own role as a leader and how that extended to sustainability leadership, since ‘the way leadership is conceptualised affects how leadership is practised’ (Torrance, 2013). He described the fact that he had always been passionate about environmental issues and had begun his career in conservation, following a degree in environmental studies. He sees sustainability as ‘huge…[it] underlies everything’, but despite this strong personal and professional sense of purpose, hearing him describe the immense pressure of leading a school that ‘requires improvement’, ² and the ever-present threat of an unannounced Ofsted inspection, gave a sense of almost unbearable demands, a beleaguered individual doing all that is humanly possible to provide the kind of education that he knows in his heart is one that will nurture, challenge and excite children. When I asked him the extent to which he considered himself an agent for change for sustainability, he said

That perception of myself as someone who can change things in various ways, maybe a small way, is why I do my job…If I didn’t think I was an agent for change I wouldn’t be doing this job. That’s the biggest driver for deciding to do it.

The curriculum

The questions of what and how children learn in school are also relevant. The national curriculum, in its current guise, represents a very narrow focus on ‘core’ subjects of literacy, numeracy and science. Teachers generally feel that the sheer volume of content that they are required to teach is unrealistic and that there has been a regression towards memorising facts (reified, objective, incontrovertible knowledge) as opposed to critical engagement with ideas and co-construction of knowledge. Sustainability does not appear at all in the curriculum and climate change only in key stages 3 and above (from age 11). This approach is characteristic of an education system whose purpose is to create effective workers who will contribute to the country’s global competitiveness. Within this paradigm, global learning becomes a vehicle for equipping young people with the skills and knowledge to become part of the global economy and is in the service of business (see Think Global, 2011).

The ‘hidden curriculum’ refers to those things children learn – values, attitudes, opinions – that are not part of the overt curriculum. Within the context of sustainability, children: learn that sustainability is separate from other areas of their competence, so that ‘an individual consumer does not have power or influence over global ecological issues’ (Seda, 2013); learn that ‘time, order, neatness, promptness and docility’ are desirable (Bloom, 1972); and become habituated into feigned engagement and continual external evaluation (Gatto, 1992). The purpose of schooling within this paradigm is the socialisation of children as conforming and malleable members of society.

Many commentators (Eisenstein, 2013; Klein, 2014; Meadows, 1972) are convinced that a more radical transformational paradigm shift must take place if humankind is to achieve a sustainable future, with individuals in harmony with each other and the planet, recognising that existing subconscious belief systems are maintaining the addiction to economic growth predicated on the burning of fossil fuels and socially unjust trade (exploitation of people and planet); a shift that must encompass education. Global challenges, such as inequalities, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, and hunger, are complex, multi-faceted and interconnected, and require new ways of thinking and relating, mobilising new types of co-constructed knowledge. Paulo Freire (1970) famously used the literacy education of workers in his native Brazil in order to support ‘conscientization’, the process of developing critical consciousness, perceiving the roots of exploitation and subjugation, and becoming empowered to challenge them. He viewed the purpose of education thus:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world (pp. 13–14).

Returning to the issue of the ways in which school leaders understand sustainability and the implications of this for leadership, it is clear that ‘environmental sustainability requires rethinking the purposes of education’ (Hursh, 2010). School leaders are currently disempowered by the ubiquitous and pervasive control of state-level policy on curriculum and the standards agenda. Until sustainability is part of the national curriculum this will continue. But even when it does become part of statutory education, it is likely that the transformational and radical roots of the concept will become de-clawed and normative.

In the meantime, there are a number of interesting possibilities for school leaders – and those involved in supporting their development – to consider.

Alternatives

Firstly, educators can utilise alternative pedagogies that create space for relaxed, collaborative, co-constructed learning and encourage critical thinking. Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an approach that encourages learning through enquiry and dialogue, and ‘encourages critical thinking, open-mindedness, respect, co-operation and empathy and helps children develop their own opinions from a range of viewpoints about global issues’ (Bourn, 2014). The learning space is a circle, in which teacher and children all sit. The skilled P4C facilitator (teacher) provides stimuli for the children (often in the form of a story or poem, but artefacts, music or pictures can be used), and the children’s responses to the stimulus are formulated into ‘thinking questions’. The whole class then votes to choose which question they would like to discuss and the facilitator uses prompts and Socratic questioning in order to enable the children to learn together through dialogue. In this approach, the focus is on collaborative co-construction of knowledge, rather than teaching to a set of prescribed objectives. Forest School Education is a play-based approach which is learner-centred and can reignite for children a sense of connection with each other and with the environment. The headteacher with whom I spoke about leading sustainability in schools mentioned this approach as a key methodology which he had adopted in school for enabling children to learn in an unstructured, self-led way.

Secondly, consideration of the importance of personal and community well-being is an essential ingredient for education for sustainability. The current level of expectation upon school leaders is self-sabotaging and unsustainable, in both senses of the word. ‘Leading for the Future’ was an action research programme for school leaders which aimed to provide training and support in order to enable school leaders to explore the question ‘How can we create more leaders for sustainability who live and work for a just and sustainable world?’ (Sander and Blair, 2011). Embedded in the philosophy and design of the programme was the recognition that the emotional well-being and engagement of participants – as well as cognitive and capability development – is a key factor in transformation towards change for education for sustainability.

Conclusion

Finally, we need to engage critically with, and provide opportunity to re-imagine, the purpose of education. If sustainability requires us to reconsider what we mean by progress (Foster, 2015) then education must become an endeavour which is focused on the common good and which is collectively owned, in which critical thinking and a nuanced understanding of global interdependencies (beyond subject or discipline boundaries) abound, and which celebrates humility and community over enterprise and consumerism. An example of where this is happening is the recent growth of cooperative schools which is interpreted by Tim Brighouse (in Woodlin, 2014) as a form of opposition to the influence of neo-liberal education policy since the 1980s, in which ‘a world of post-war trust and co-operative idealism where each – central and local politician, teacher, parent and administrator – played their part, has disintegrated into a largely atomised system where national politicians have put their faith in a ‘market’ of schooling’ (p. 195). Cooperative schools are community-run and their management as well as teaching and learning is deeply entrenched in the cooperative values of democratic participation in order to create the conditions for human flourishing.