One in four schools in England have a Sustainability Lead, that sounds like a system that is about to ‘tip’

According to a Teacher Tapp survey of 9,367 teachers, 24% of schools in England have now appointed a Sustainability Lead. This is a small increase on last year’s 18%, are we about to see a sudden increase, or will progress now stall?

Looked at through the lens of the DfE’s targets, 24% is desperately disappointing. According to the 2022 DfE Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy, the figure should have hit 100% in September 2025. So we are way off.

However, looked at through the lens of, well, *everything else* – there is a lot going on in education, environment, politics – 24% is actually quite encouraging. We might therefore want to celebrate the fact a quarter of schools in England now have a Sustainability Lead, that’s a full 6,000 people who have taken on the role!

In diffusion of innovation speak, what’s happened is that the ‘innovators’ who came on board before, and just after, the 2022 strategy launch, have now been joined by what looks like a slowly expanding group of ‘early adopters’. This puts us in ‘tipping point’ territory, the ‘early majority’ might already be starting to form, but systems don’t always tip, sometimes a ‘chasm’ opens up and progress stalls.

The question therefore is what the DfE can do to ‘tip’ the system and avoid the ‘chasm’? They have an opportunity now to make having a Sustainability Lead and a Climate Action Plan the norm across England. I can think of at least four things they could try, you will find them below, but first, some context.

Build it and they will come?

Soon after 2022, to begin delivery on its strategy, DfE began funding three major initiatives: the National Education Nature Park, the Climate Ambassadors programme, and the Sustainability Support for Education hub.

Global Action Plan was part of a consortium that submitted a bid to build and run the support hub. What was clear when we were designing that bid was that once the budget lines for all the essential things needed to build and maintain a hub had been calculated, there would be almost zero budget left over to do the most critical thing – make schools aware that the hub exists and encourage them to use it. In other words, marketing.

We weren’t successful with our bid, but it is clear that the successful consortium, as well as the organisations who were contracted to run the sister programmes – the Ambassadors and the Nature Park – also had very little budget left over for marketing.

It is not that they have not done anything to spread the word and get people engaged, they have. But it has been relatively small scale and rarely cuts through the noise that surrounds school leaders. Through no real fault of the organisations running the three programmes, their marketing approach has amounted to nothing much more than ‘build it and they will come’.

This could have been avoided. The DfE could have done one of two things to prevent it:

1. When they drafted the invitations to tender (ITTs) for each programme, they could have stipulated in the specifications that a well-resourced and strategic advertising campaign had to be delivered; or

2. and this would have been more cost effective – they could have put out a separate ITT for a dedicated high profile advertising campaign to drive up engagement with the strategy and its three headline programmes.

DfE could still do the latter, and this may form part of the forthcoming revised DfE sustainability and climate change strategy, I hope so. But these are cash strapped times, so there won’t be many ad agencies banking on a multi-million-pound contract coming in any time soon.

Four ways for DfE to mainstream sustainability and climate change

So, what else could DfE do to help ‘tip’ the education system? What could they do that is low cost, high impact? How can we go from 1 in 4 schools having a Sustainability Lead to something closer to 3 out of 4 having one? And, is this possible in the time between now and the next General Election? We think so.

Here are just four ideas, I’m sure others can think of more:

1. Ensure that all Department for Education contractors are required to demonstrate how they are supporting the delivery of the DfE’s Sustainability and Climate Change strategy.

2. To support the above, insert sustainability and climate change education into key DfE frameworks and guidance, for example the ITT Criteria and Supporting Advice, the mandatory Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (ITTECF), the SEND Code of Practice, and the Teachers’ Standards guidance.*

3. Send the Secretary of State and their Ministers out regularly to do speeches and the media rounds so that climate change and sustainability education is being talked about in the papers, on the Today programme, on the TV, on social media, and at the education conferences.

4. Heed the recommendations in our recent co-produced curriculum policy proposal by including a headline statement on climate change and nature education at the beginning of the National Curriculum, and throughout it – a statement for every subject.     

* This is a climate and nature emergency, it is not unreasonable to expect teachers to have a basic level of climate and nature literacy, and a grasp of what climate change and sustainability education is, if they want to reach Qualified Teacher Status.

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This article was first published on the Global Action Plan Education pages.