by Simon Lightman
If sustainability really matters to schools, why does it so often slip down the priority list the moment accountability pressure rises?
That question feels especially pressing right now. Provisional reporting from the Met Office shows that 2025 was the warmest and sunniest year on record in the UK, while globally the past two years sit at the very top of historical temperature records. These are not neutral statistics. They reflect accelerating climate change and its growing negative impacts, from extreme weather to wider social and economic conditions young people are growing up within.
Despite this, sustainability in many schools’ lives at the edges. It appears as enrichment: a student group, a themed week, or a cluster of projects driven by committed staff. Often, these initiatives are thoughtful, but they are also fragile. When timetables tighten, exam pressures intensify, or inspection looms, sustainability is usually the first thing to be squeezed.
This is not because school leaders do not care. The problem is that sustainability is still treated as optional rather than essential. Schools are not neutral containers into which new priorities can simply be dropped. What is timetabled gets protected, what is assessed gets taken seriously, and what is inspected gets prioritised. Anything that sits outside these structures struggles to endure.
When sustainability depends on individual champions rather than institutional design, it remains exposed. Staff move on, leadership priorities shift, and initiative fatigue sets in. Sustainability may remain visible, even celebrated, but it rarely becomes durable. This is why it cannot be solved through better projects alone. It is not primarily a curriculum problem; it is a leadership and governance problem.
At heart, this is a question of purpose. The issue is not simply what students know about climate change or sustainability; it is what kind of people schools are quietly shaping them to become in response to ecological and social uncertainty. When sustainability is treated as peripheral, the implicit message is that it matters less than the real business of schooling, which is too often reduced to individual attainment and personal success.
Schools do not exist only to produce qualifications. They are places where young people learn how to live with others, exercise responsibility, and relate to the world beyond themselves. In that sense, schools help sustain social cohesion, democratic life, and the conditions in which both human and more than human worlds can flourish.
One useful way to think about the shift this requires is through analogy. Sustainability needs to follow the same path that safeguarding has taken over the past two decades. Safeguarding was once seen as a narrow concern. Today it cuts across leadership, policy, training, and culture, and no serious leader would describe it as optional.
Sustainability needs to be understood in the same way. Not as a project or bolt-on, but as a responsibility that informs decisions across the institution. That does not mean schools suddenly doing everything differently. It means doing ordinary things with wider consequences in mind.
In practical terms, this could begin by ensuring nature has a seat at the leadership table. Some schools are beginning to do this through a designated sustainability lead working with senior leaders, students, staff, and governors. Their role is not to run projects, but to help ask better questions, ensuring environmental and social impacts are considered in curriculum planning, estates decisions, partnerships, and strategy.
None of this removes the pressure school leaders operate under. Inspection, accountability, parental expectation, and progression routes remain real constraints. However, pretending sustainability can thrive without engaging those structures is wishful thinking. If sustainability is to move beyond symbolic inclusion, it must be aligned with leadership, governance, curriculum, and accountability, not left at the margins.
If schools are serious about long-term educational purpose, leadership, and accountability, sustainability cannot remain an optional extra. It needs to be understood as part of the core work of education.
The question, then, is not whether schools can afford to embed sustainability more deeply. It is whether we can afford for them not to.
Author note
Simon Lightman, Educator, Writer and Consultant in Transformative Sustainability and Global Citizenship Education.
Simon works across schools, research, and civil society on sustainability education, curriculum renewal, and youth flourishing. He holds advisory, board, and trustee roles across education and works closely with schools on whole-school change, alongside his role as a practising secondary school teacher.
He recently coordinated a cross-sector open letter to the Department for Education, Ofsted, and the Education Select Committee on curriculum renewal, building on the Curriculum and Assessment Review and calling for sustainability, systems thinking, and intergenerational fairness to be placed at the heart of future learning.
The full letter can be read here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KA-akso6TacawnX8oJl8Juwhd7iLVfaS/view
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