It’s not that staff don’t care, but sustainability always gets squeezed unless you find ways to embed it in decision-making, writes 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. 2025 was the warmest and sunniest year on record in the UK, and 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 the wider social and economic conditions young people now grow up in.
Sustainability is treated as optional
Yet in many schools, sustainability 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 fragile. When timetables tighten, exam pressures intensify, or inspection looms, sustainability is usually squeezed.
This is not because school leaders do not care. The problem is that sustainability is still treated as optional, not 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. What is inspected gets prioritised. Anything 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. It may be visible or even celebrated, but sustainability rarely becomes sustainable.
Sustainability can learn from safeguarding
It cannot be solved through better projects alone. It is not primarily a curriculum problem. It is a leadership and governance problem.
This is a question of purpose. It is not simply what students know about climate change or sustainability, but rather what kind of people schools are quietly shaping them to be in response to ecological and social uncertainty.
When sustainability is treated as peripheral, the implicit message is it matters less than the real business of schooling. That in turn 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 non-human worlds can flourish.
An analogy is useful. Sustainability needs to follow the same path safeguarding has taken over the past two decades.
It was once seen as a narrow concern. Today, safeguarding cuts across leadership, policy, training, and culture. No serious leader would describe it as optional.
Sustainability should be understood the same way – not as a project or bolt-on, but 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.
Let’s appoint sustainability leads
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.
But 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.
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