House of Commons - Environmental Audit

Select Committee on Environmental Audit Written Evidence

APPENDIX 10

Memorandum from the Development Education Project (DEP), Manchester

Details of organisation: The DEP is an independent charity and part of a network of Development Education Centres around the UK. The DEP provides resources, training and support to the formal sector of education (mainly primary and secondary schools, plus initial teacher education and training) to promote the global dimension to education and issues of global citizenship and ESD.

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION: A FOLLOW-UP TO LEARNING THE SUSTAINABILITY LESSON

1. Has the term Education for Sustainable Development lost its currency? Does it have any resonance with the general public? Has the environmental message within it been lost?

The term Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) does not seem to have any real resonance with the public. It does not even have much resonance for most teachers or trainee teachers. Amongst those who take an interest on the global education/development education/environmental education fields, ESD does seem to be gaining in currency, though there is always debate about any phrase that includes for, and the issue of whether it is learning for sustainability or sustainable development (some of our own research has indicated that if young people only come across the phrase sustainable in relation to development, they are less able to apply it to other areas eg sustainable transport, sustainable communities etc).

Many people seem to think that ESD is almost synonymous with environmental education or environmental sustainability, but the term environmental education itself seems to be losing currency and subsumed in ESD. However, environmental education is an important pre-requisite of ESD, to be able to connect with ecology and the natural world.

More needs to be done to promote the idea of the interplay between social, economic and environmental factors, and whether they are all equal or, for example, whether the environment should be seen as the most important factor, as we only have one planet to live on and we ignore our impact on its ecology at our peril.

2. The DfES said in 2003 that the Sustainable Development Action Plan was supposed to signal the start of a process of change, identifying the most powerful levers: what can be achieved immediately and what can be built upon. More than a year on can it be said that that process of change has begun and have there been any immediate achievements?

The main achievement was in getting the Action Plan produced so soon after the EAC enquiry and covering the four key areas that it did, plus making clear who should be involved in each part of it. However, though it said that there has been enough talk and the plan will be about action, this has not been seen on the ground. The Plan itself obtained very little publicity beyond those working in the field. We rarely come across teachers, trainees or tutors who are aware of it. At a recent conference of 60 Secondary Geography teachers in one of the Greater Manchester boroughs, I held up a copy of the plan and asked how many had seen it—about five had (many of them new trainees we had worked with on their university course)—yet Geography is one of the subject areas that explicitly has to cover sustainable development issues.

The university we are working with seems to show little awareness of the Action Plan or their key role within it, beyond a few committed tutors (who have succeeded in setting up a sustainability course for school bursars).

Too few policies or pronouncements from the DfES make mention of sustainability issues. The recent Five Year Plan makes no mention of learning for a more sustainable future.

3. Government is currently reviewing the UK Sustainable Development Strategy. What should the Strategy include in order to significantly strengthen the role of learning within it?

As the final report of the Panel for ESD recommended, learning for a sustainable future needs to become a key part of all areas of learning: formal, non-formal, informal and social. This means that bodies such as the Learning and Skills Council and the Sector Skills Council should be engaging in widespread debate about what these skills might be, and how they should be linked to all areas of lifelong learning. The various shake-ups of the curriculum do not seem to be taking this into account. More attention should be paid to pioneering courses and approaches, such as the NVQ in sustainable development and PP4SD (Professional Practice for Sustainable Development).

Part of the SD Review was "A Dialogue paper for Local Authorities" which pointed out that Local Authorities have a crucial role in delivering community well-being and the delivery of the government's sustainable development strategy. Community well-being, according to the paper, is taken to encompass four key features: Balance (between economic, social and environmental well-being), Wider impacts (addressing national and global concerns through local action), Long-term (taking account of the needs of future generations and developing a long-term vision) and Participation (engaging and involving local communities, using their ideas, skills etc). Why have I never seen this as part of any local authority discussion or documentation? Why is this not being proposed as a key strategy for public engagement?

4. Does the 14-19 Working Group's report, 14-19 Curriculum and Qualifications Reform, go far enough? Will ESD be adequately represented if this report is used as the basis for the forthcoming White Paper? What must be included in the White Paper if progress is to be made to fully integrate ESD into all aspects of learning, formal and informal?

The proposal in terms of changing the assessment framework and allowing a broader education to continue to a higher level, as well as recognising the importance of vocational education seems welcome. However, in the need for the reforms and the proposals, no mention is made of the need to connect more with the urgency of the sustainability agenda or the need to think and act as informed and responsible global citizens. Education does not happen in a vacuum. The first line of the "Values, Aims and Purposes" of the National Curriculum is:

and the kind of society we want to be

When I have done training with teachers asking them to reflect on current values, the list is always very negative yet most of their desired future values fit in very much with the sustainability agenda. However, they are uncertain about their role in values education and are mostly unaware of the strong set of values in the "Values, Aims and Purposes". They are also mostly unaware of the section:

secure their commitment to sustainable development at a personal, local, national and global level

The experience of our recent "Learning for Sustinable Cities project" (working with teachers in cities in the North and South) has shown that engaging young people and teachers as active citizens, and developing learning communities around local to global sustainability issues, can really bring learning to life, raise self-esteem and lead to lifestyle changes. This only happens if time and space is built in to discuss and engage in the sustainability agenda, and share learning with others, from school to community. It also needs to recognise that it is not a quick fix, but requires commitment over a number of years (something that those who fund such projects also need to consider).

5. In response to our last inquiry the DfES said they recognised that more could be done to embed ESD in the school curriculum and that they would lead on strengthening ESD links within geography, design and technology, science and citizenship. Has there been any discernible improvement in these areas? Is there evidence that this work has been taken forward by the DfES and its agencies?

As my answer to Question 2 has described, most Geography teachers seem unaware of the Action Plan. At the same meeting I asked these 60 teachers how many of them were teachers of Citizenship: only four put up their hands, as they had been asked to teach it. An adviser from a neighbouring authority was appalled, feeling that all Geography teachers should automatically see themselves as teachers of Citizenship. I would argue that all teachers are teaching Citizenship as soon as they walk in the door of the school (and beyond!) but this does not seem to be the case. Most teachers see it as yet another add on, and that some person with a small allowance for the subject will get hold of materials, and tell them what they have to do. Even trainees are picking up negative attitudes about Citizenship from their time at the "chalk face", when they should be the new enthusiasts going out to inspire others.

Links with ESD and Citizenship are now being talked about increasingly by subject associations like the Geography Association and the Association of Citizenship Teachers, but there is a lot of work to be done on the ground, and the DfES seems to have done little to promote it. The DfID has done a far greater amount in this area, through the promotion of the Global Dimension (with eight key concepts, which include Citizenship, Sustainable Development, Interdependence, Social, justice etc), and their funding of regional and sub-regional strategies, and projects in schools and HE institutions. These are bringing together educators and service providers around a diverse agenda.

6. The role of informal learning, including youth work, work-based learning and adult and community learning, in taking the environmental education agenda forward is key. Is the Government doing enough in these crucial areas?

See answer to Question 3.

7. Is there any evidence to suggest that the Government, through its stewardship of education, is getting better at getting the environmental message across to the general public? And is there any evidence to suggest that sufficient work is being done at regional and local levels to support environmental education?

The Learning to Last report highlighted the fact that the focus of most government public education campaigns, on raising awareness of issues and everyone "doing their bit" was not enough. Much more needs to be done to look at how people can work through the issues, preferably by discussing with others, and then developing a sense of "action competence", the feeling that they can do something through informed choice.

The importance of this last feature is recognised in the review of 10 years of ESD published by UNESCO for the World Summit on Sustainable Development:

"Indeed, among the most successful programmes are those that avoid the belief that awareness leads to understanding, understanding leads to concern, and concern motivates the development of skills and action. Instead, the key ingredient of success is to start from the questions, issues and problems that concern young people themselves, and to help them develop action competence through community-based learning. Action competence brings the capacity to envision alternatives, clarify the values and interests that underlie different visions, and make choices between visions. This includes developing the skills to plan, take action and evaluate needed in active and informed citizens. Action competence brings knowledge, not just of the problem and its symptoms but also about its root causes—how it impacts on people's lives, ways of addressing it, and how different interests are served by different sorts of solutions."

(From Rio to Johannesburg: Lessons learnt from a decade of commitment, UNESCO 2002)

Education needs to engage young people with their communities so that all can debate and work out ways to take informed action.

However, even everyone doing their bit in our relatively affluent society is not enough for global sustainability. As I have written (in a forthcoming teaching pack on "Learning for Sustainable Cities"), based on research by the Stockholm Environment Institute, looking at residents of "Bedzed", one of the UK's most sustainable communities:

"Ecologically conscious residents at Bedzed can reduce their energy footprint by 90% compared to the UK average, but their food footprint is only 26% less than the UK average—unless you are going to grow all your own food (a challenging task in many city living environments), it is very hard to purchase food products in the UK that are mainly locally sourced. The individual, in a high consuming culture, can have limited impact on the resources consumed by shared services (eg public administration and commercial services). Currently processes do not reflect the true environmental (and often social) costs."

We can all do our bit, but the more we learn, the more we see that national and international legislation needs to reflect the true environmental (and social) costs. The fact that the government is planning to spend millions on a campaign to try and get the public to recycle more, without tackling issues of extended producer responsibility (or penalising built-in obsolescence) and is failing to provide the funds for effective kerbside collection, indicates that they have not started to learn the sustainability lesson.

However, at a local level a number of local authorities have started to set ESD or Eco-school networks, usually supported by Council Environment Departments, and only minimally supported by Education Departments (as School Improvement Officers cannot seem to fit this into their crowded schedules, as it has not yet been pointed out at a high enough level, that engaging in the ESD agenda can help to raise achievement).

8. Are there sufficient resources available to deliver the government's commitment to education for sustainable development?

Though there could be better and more joined up use made of existing funds, there is clearly no way near enough money available to tackle a mass public re-education campaign towards more sustainable living. As someone said to me recently "You could spend £1million on a campaign in Wigan to get people to take climate change more seriously and still need to do more." NGOs who are engaged with this agenda struggle to get long-term funding. What about the evidence from your last report, of work such as the Global Action Plan project, working with neighbourhoods to share together how to make their lifestyles more sustainable? Why are there not more school-community projects in this vein, sharing their learning locally and globally?

More needs to be done to push the sustainability message and politicians need to explain to the public that we may have to face tough choices, that a lifestyle of never-ending consumption paid for on credit is not sustainable.

Pointing out that the collective impact of individual choices is important needs to be addressed, as Baroness Young of the Environment Agency has recognised:

"Increasingly. . . solutions to environmental challenges lie in individual decisions—to drive, to consume, to throw away. We have to overcome ignorance, apathy and the widespread belief that there will be a "technofix" somewhere down the road. We shouldn't be scared of bold measures such as taxing environmental behaviour to encourage good. The deal is, however, that we make it easy to be green."

The DfID has made a good start on promoting more active engagement with their "Rough Guide to a Better World" which will be available at Post Offices, but without a major government and media focus, the debate will stay with the informed few.

Cheshire County Council has demonstrated that you can change perceptions and behaviour by insisting on sustainable design for all their new build and refurbished schools. They have just opened Kingsmead Primary in Northwich, built at the DfES recommended price of £1,500 per square metre. The project has been a huge learning curve for the builders and architects (and they had to go abroad to obtain many of the materials, as there is such a dearth of sustainable design in the UK, though they factored in the footprint of various choices of materials), but they have built the most sustainable school in the country, and are now even more committed to the agenda. Why is this not being trumpeted by the DfES and others as an example of how we can move towards more sustainable living and learning?

November 2004



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