The UN 2030 agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) envisions a future of inclusive equity, justice and prosperity within environmental limits, and places an important emphasis on education as stated in Goal 4. Education is acknowledged as a means for achieving the remaining Goals, with Sustainability as a goal for education in target 4.7. However, the interconnectedness of the SDGs and the complexity of Sustainability as a concept make it difficult to relate the SDGs to educational learning outcomes, with what Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aims to achieve remaining ambiguous. To address this, the aim of the thesis was to develop a framework to redefine ESD as a tool that can deliver the Sustainability transformation required. Using the SDGs as end points for a Sustainability state, and through a participatory approach, education stakeholders and learners work together to construct a localised vision of Sustainability, relate this to educational outcomes and identify the competences the learners need to develop as citizens for the Sustainability vision to emerge. The framework allows for the development of evaluation tools that can support educational institutions to monitor and manage their progress in transforming societies towards Sustainability.
Universities are engines of societal transformation, can nurture future citizens and can navigate them towards Sustainability through their educational programmes. The contribution of these programmes to Sustainability depends on how well aligned their intended learning outcomes are to Sustainability and then how effective they are in developing these as competences in students. The tool developed therefore first reviews the alignment of University programmes intended learning outcomes to the enabling conditions for a vision of Sustainability based on the SDGs to emerge and then how effective the programmes are in developing Sustainability competences in their students.
The first part is based on a systemic grouping of the SDGs into eight Sustainability attributes, using multi-criteria analysis to compare and rank programmes according to the alignment of their learning outcomes to the Sustainability attributes and their contribution to Sustainability. From its testing using data from a University’s eighteen master’s programmes on a range of subjects and then application to compare forty UK and European master’s programmes focusing on environment and Sustainability, findings demonstrated that even environmental programmes face some important gaps related to health, wellbeing, diversity, inclusion, and collaboration, amongst others, and reinforce the need for all universities to understand the contribution of their programmes to Sustainability. The second part of the tool developed covered the effectiveness of educational programmes by evaluating the attainment of Sustainability competences in University students. Its application was demonstrated through a case study of a Master’s programme, offering insights of how it can benefit Higher Education practitioners to improve how they deliver their programmes’ learning outcomes as Sustainability competences in students, and how they can use the evidence created to monitor progress. As an example, the potential of the tool to inform the programme’s ongoing curriculum review was discussed.
Considering the potential to shape learners from a young age towards behaviours aligned with promotion of planetary health and wellbeing, the framework was then applied and further developed for school education. Its application for selecting and assessing learning outcomes for Sustainability was researched in two case studies in the UK, conducted in a primary and a secondary school that followed different approaches in integrating ESD into their curricula. The primary school introduced ESD as the thread that pervades and links all curricular subjects, whereas the secondary school introduced a new course on the SDGs. Both schools were found to be effective in developing the intended learning outcomes in their students, with some weaknesses related to their approach identified as well.
Overall the thesis delivered its objectives, demonstrating the framework’s potential to evaluate the contribution of education to Sustainability, as well as to assess students’ Sustainability competences development at different stages, contributing to the operationalisation of the role of educational programmes to Sustainability transformation.