Like learning to read...

It’s the new literacy - and it’s sorely needed for the 21st century. Everyone should understand something about sustainability, insists Sara Parkin - and Polly Curtis welcomes signs that students soon might.

Computer ‘literacy’ is considered an essential 21st century skill. Yet the Moser report in 1999 found that one in five adults in the UK still weren’t functionally literate in its original sense - they couldn’t “understand and employ printed information in daily life, at home, at work and in the community”. This kind of literacy has been thought of as basic rather than elite for well over 150 years.

What are the chances, then, of bringing sustainability literacy into the canon of 21st century skills before the UN’s Decade for Sustainable Development Education is up? Hopes need to be high, because success here is vital and our ignorance is now terribly dangerous. The natural systems on which all life depends are threatened by deeply troubling negative trends.

Poverty, and inequality of all kinds of opportunity, are having a corroding effect within countries as well as between them. Inequality is even being recognised as a top business risk these days. Personally, I’d put the bulk of the security budget into a sustainability literacy for all campaign, spreading the essential understanding that you need a healthy environment to live, while it is social justice that makes people feel safe.

“A musician needs to know enough about sustainability to check whether their violin has been made by forced child labour.”

It’s astonishing we are so sustainability illiterate in countries like the UK. How is it, for example, that some waste managers are so ignorant of the laws of physics that they come up with strategies for handling waste that actually increase pollution? Recycling can be good, but not if loads of extra energy has to be added to the waste first.

And at the other end of the production and consumption process, how many design students understand just how much waste there is to squeeze out of the system before we buy any goods and services? Fortunately, a helpful message from Forum for the Future’s work with universities (www.heps.org.uk) confirms that, just as you don’t need to be able to programme a computer to use it successfully, so you don’t need a degree in physics or human psychology to become sustainability literate.

You just need to know enough - with what is enough depending more or less on what your job is. A hairdresser and a water company engineer will both need to know some chemistry, though not to the same levels. A sustainability literate accountant would need to know how to calculate spend on health and education as an investment, not a cost - looking for benefits from that investment across other budgets because healthier, more educated people cost less and contribute more at work and in society. And so on.

Even a musician needs to know enough about sustainability to check whether their violin has been made by forced child labour or not. The first UN Earth Summit (in Stockholm way back in 1972) advocated education as a key to achieving sustainability. We didn’t invest in it then, and look what has happened. I won’t believe that this government is sustainability literate if it doesn’t invest in it now.

Sara Parkin is programme director of Forum for the Future and sits on the Environment Agency board.

A SUSTAINABILTY LITERATE PERSON WOULD BE ABLE TO:

A head of steam is building up behind sustainability literacy. No longer can it be confined to environment modules and classes taught by individual enthusiasts Nor can it be seen in narrow terms. Students aren’t going to be too excited about the idea “if it’s just about learning what impacts on the environment”, says Bronwen Thomas, campaigns manager at the student environmental group People and Planet.

“ If it’s about how you can be a member of society, that would be more popular.” The debate that’s emerging is still partly about the concept, but there’s also a sense that it’s time to tackle the practicalities of how people should learn sustainability literacy throughout higher and further education. Andy Johnston, head of Forum for the Future’s education and learning programme, takes the example of an engineering lecture, in which students might expect to learn about how to build a bridge.

“With a sustainability approach,” he says, “there’s also reflection and learning about the impact the bridge will have on the community, the environment and the economy. Ultimately, sustainability literacy will be measured in the change in actions and behaviour of graduates.”

“If it’s tagged on like IT, it won’t be taken seriously. It has to be part of the way we learn.”

For each individual student, becoming sustainability literate will involve gaining general awareness and a set of core competencies [see box above], while also developing more specific sustainability skills connected with their subject expertise. But Leeds University-based Simon Smith is anxious to dispel any misunderstanding that this is some kind of dogma, requiring students to think in a particular way. “It’s not,” he says.

“It’s about graduates who can think for themselves and question the way things are done.” As manager of the philosophical and religious studies subject centre, which is part of the Higher Education Academy’s sustainable development forum, he’s naturally sensitive to the philosophical argument. “In the lecture hall,” he insists, “you won’t find a one-way, ‘imparting knowledge from above’ style of teaching, but an interactive student-centred approach which gets them questioning what they are doing.”

As for the way sustainability literacy should fit into the curriculum, Smith sees a parallel in what Leeds is doing through its Centre for Excellence in Ethics - working with trainee doctors both to provide a medical ethics module, and to embed an ethical approach across every module they take. This is now planned to be spread through the other subject curricula at the university. At Kingston University a similar pattern is being followed in the surveying department.

All their planning, architectural, surveying and building courses are being brought together, to focus on sustainable development in the built environment. It’s a neat idea, albeit with a cumbersome name - the Centre for Sustainable Communities Achieved Through Integrated Professional Education (C-SCAIPE). Sarah Sayce, who led the project’s bid for a £3 million grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), says its effects will be spread out to other departments. What they’ve found is that in some cases a stand-alone module on sustainability has been appropriate, but that it also needs to be woven through the curriculum. “It would be totally wrong to just put it as a module in every subject; that would be a turn-off to students,” she says.

“It needs to be woven in. A separate module in every subject would be a turn-off.”

In the sprawling and less well-funded further education sector, progress is especially complex because colleges don’t devise their own curricula. “We’re at the embryonic stage,” says Angela Perrett of the Association of South East Colleges. An ‘environmental champions’ network, set up with the Environment Agency, is now sharing best practice between colleges in the region. The understanding of environmental impact issues is beginning to be seen as an integral element in some curricula, says Perrett.

“What they are trying to do now is address sustainability through additional programmes.” So we might start to see it featuring in induction courses, or among the options people can choose alongside their core courses. Among the trailblazers is Itchen College on the south coast, which has carried out an audit of its programmes to find out where sustainability is already being taught, and is planning to spread it through all subjects from business to sports science.

Concerted impetus to break down the barriers, and get sustainability literacy integrated into courses of all sorts, is now coming from the pioneering Sustainability Integration Group (SIGnet). This initiative (www.sig-net.org.uk) was recently set up by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) with Forum for the Future and the organisations that plan, fund and regulate post-school education, plus employers and government departments. It was boosted by the unequivocal statement in the government’s sustainable development strategy Securing the Future that sustainability literacy should be a “core competency” for professional graduates.

Both HEFCE and the Learning and Skills Council are in the process of publishing sustainable development strategies, and Defra and DfES are conducting a consulation on government funding of sustainable development education. Each will raise new questions, not least about where any new funding will come from. The importance of what’s at stake demands real investment in the future.

Bronwen Thomas, from a student’s perspective, is quite clear about that. “There is a danger of it being tagged on like IT and not taken seriously by students. It has to be made a part of the way we’re learning. It has to be done well - and taken seriously by the institution.”

Polly Curtis is a reporter for Education Guardian.

22 July 2005

Polly Curtis and Sara Parkin