Learning joined-up

We’re going to need a civil service that’s ‘sustainability literate’. It’s an idea whose time has come – and the education sector is gearing up to get it into the mainstream.

As a catch-phrase, ‘joined-up’ may not be quite in mint condition, but in Securing the Future, the government’s new Strategy for Sustainable Development (SD), it certainly gets a serious work-out. There’s a lot of emphasis here on coherent approaches. Happily, when it comes to the chapter on ‘Ensuring it happens’, there’s also a corresponding recognition of the need for more general government competence on ‘doing’ SD. Capacity building is the name of the game, from the local level [see ‘Together, can we?’] all the way up through regional structures to national and global policy. Admittedly, at regional level there are fewer answers than questions, particularly since last year’s referendum in the north-east gave a resounding raspberry to the notion that elected regional assemblies were the way forward. So there’s a lot riding on a promised review of regional delivery by the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC). As there is, too, on ‘mainstreaming’ SD thinking in the civil service. The planned National School of Government, which will play an important part here, is (fortunately) not expected just to appear from thin air. Staff in its precursor organisation, the Centre for Policy and Management Studies (CMPS), have already been reaching out to civil servants across government with a pioneering series of events, looking at the impact of SD on policy delivery in the coming years. The first seminars, led by luminaries such as the SDC’s Jonathon Porritt and the government’s chief scientific adviser David King, have tapped into a rich vein of interest. Government departments with a clear environmental remit may be increasingly familiar with these ideas, but others are finding some of the propositions more challenging. To do justice to the new definition of sustainable development set out in Securing the Future – in which ‘high and stable levels of economic growth and employment’ has been replaced by ‘a sustainable economy’ – it has to become part of the culture right across government, not least in the Treasury. One process to watch will be Regulatory Impact Assessment, a requirement for all departments to do a sustainability appraisal for policies with significant impact. The beefed-up scrutiny role for the SDC [see ‘Measure for measure’] should also help. But ultimately, learning experiences that challenge deeply embedded ways of working have to be part of the plan. The significance of this has not escaped Margaret Saner, deputy chief executive of the CMPS. “It’s absolutely essential that sustainability is rescued from the eco-ghetto, and I know it has to be a central strand in our offer. Buy-in from our senior team is the first step, but from there it’s a question of finding the right learning vehicles for colleagues across the service.” That search will inevitably take a future National School of Government into the intriguing debate about SD competencies. It can’t just take a content-led approach and run courses on SD for the interested few; it needs to work from a clear sense of what you are supposed to be good at, in order to ‘do’ sustainability. Andy Johnston, who heads the Education and Learning Programme at Forum for the Future, wants to see a proper strategic approach to that question. The desperate need for general ‘sustainability literacy’, he says, doesn’t mean everyone has to become a sustainability expert. “The important thing is for all civil servants to be able to recognise how the challenges they face are part of the SD agenda, and how the key relationships they have to manage all have the potential to make a contribution to sustainability. Then they need to be able to do something about it, or facilitate someone else to. A big part of that will be learning how to recognise, motivate and reward others – locally or nationally – to come up with the solutions.” This issue goes way beyond government, of course. As a nation, are we sufficiently ‘sustainability literate’? Not yet, you’d have to say – not by a long chalk. But people do seem to be catching on to the idea that all graduates, at least, should emerge from their courses with a decent grasp of some key concepts – how to seek economic prosperity without threatening our natural environment, for instance, and how to go about it in a way that contributes to social wellbeing. You may think this sounds blindingly obvious, but it’s still pretty revolutionary to have it taken on board as a key goal of our higher education system. It has actually been almost two years since the Department for Education and Skills released its own Sustainable Development Action Plan (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/sd), making all kinds of good noises about how best practice should become common practice. Spurred on by this encouragement at the top, pockets of excellent ideas and initiatives have been emerging all over the place. Securing the Future takes the whole thing on, specifically recognising the contribution that the formal education sector can make, and identifying the spread of sustainability literacy as a key mechanism for making sure that the Strategy’s priorities are delivered. It’s even part of the new set of indicators that will help us monitor progress – tracking the impact of formal learning on knowledge and awareness of SD. There is a big emphasis on interconnection between organisations, which means that a shared language and arena is essential in order to join up all the different educational bodies, regional bodies, and employers. Professional bodies are being encouraged to integrate SD competencies into their qualifications – and, across the whole post-school education sector, Forum for the Future is now running a new DfES-funded network known as the Sustainability Integration Group (SIGnet). Its key role is to get all the funding, planning and regulatory bodies working together to raise the profile of sustainability literacy, backed up by a dedicated website (www.sig-net.org.uk) and a series of events. – Ben Tuxworth and Roger East

24 June 2005

Ben Tuxworth and Roger East