QAA Membership Podcast

Sustaining Higher Education in Challenging Times

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How can sustainability stay central in higher education amid financial pressures?

In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Rehema White (University of St Andrews) and Charlotte Bonner (EAUC CEO) challenge the idea that sustainability is a luxury. Instead, they argue it is core to higher education’s mission—equipping graduates to navigate complexity and drive positive change.

We explore how sustainability intersects with priorities like quality education, decolonising curricula, and student wellbeing, offering a unifying framework rather than a competing agenda. The conversation also touches on compassionate education, eco-anxiety, and empowering students as change-makers.

Our guests share inspiring examples from UK institutions and reflect on the ongoing journey of embedding sustainability in meaningful, context-specific ways. They leave us with hopeful insights about the future of education and its role in shaping a more sustainable world.

Tune in for an essential conversation about higher education’s purpose in challenging times.

Resources and further reading:
Perspectives and Practices of Education for Sustainable Development, Edited By Rehema M. White, Simon Kemp, Elizabeth A. C. Price, James W. S. Longhurst (https://www.routledge.com/Perspectives-and-Practices-of-Education-for-Sustainable-Development-A-Critical-Guide-for-Higher-Education/White-Kemp-Price-Longhurst/p/book/9781032588018)

QAA's newly revised and updated 2025 Subject Benchmark Statements (https://www.qaa.ac.uk/the-quality-code/subject-benchmark-statements#april-2025)

QAA and Advance HE's Education for Sustainable Development guidance (https://www.qaa.ac.uk/the-quality-code/education-for-sustainable-development)

QAA-funded Education for Sustainable Development Collaborative Enhancement Projects (https://www.qaa.ac.uk//en/membership/benefits-of-qaa-membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/education-for-sustainable-development):

Kerr Castle:

Welcome to the QAA podcast. I'm Dr Kerr Castle and I'm delighted to introduce this latest episode focused on sustainability. Specifically, how can institutions keep sustainability as a priority in light of the challenges currently facing the sector? With increasing pressures across higher education, from financial constraints to shifting student expectations, it's easy to see how sustainability can sometimes get sidelined, but it's vital that we continue to integrate sustainable development into everything we do, because the future of our institutions and indeed our planet depends on it.

Kerr Castle:

In this episode, we're joined by two exceptional voices in the field. Dr Rehema White is a senior lecturer and researcher in sustainable development at the University of St Andrews, and Charlotte Bonner is CEO of the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges, or the EAUC. They bring deep insight and wide experience to the conversation. The discussion is chaired by Lucy Leake, one of QAA's membership quality specialists, who leads the conversation with a series of thoughtful and timely questions. Why must sustainability remain central to institutional missions? How do we ensure it's treated as essential rather than optional, and where can we find inspiring examples of higher education providers getting it right? It's a thought-provoking episode, so, without further ado, let's join Lucy, Rehema and Charlotte and get the conversation started.

Lucy Leake:

Hello and welcome to this QAA podcast. I'm Lucy Leake, a quality specialist at QAA, and I'm delighted to be joined by two wonderful guests today for our conversation about sustainability in higher education. Before we get started, I'd like to invite our guests to introduce themselves and tell us about their roles. Can I start with you, Rehema?

Rehema White:

Hi, thanks very much for having us here. So my name is Rehema White and I currently work at the University of St Andrews where I'm an academic in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development, so I have roles teaching and in supporting teaching and learning in the Sustainable Development Programme. I also look after CITSE, which is our Sustainability in the Curriculum Institutional Body which integrates staff and students to support sustainability across our university, and I'm chair of Learning for Sustainability Scotland, and this is my longest title. It means that it's the regional centre of expertise in education for sustainable development for Scotland, which is hosted by University of Edinburgh, but we're a nationwide entity.

Lucy Leake:

Amazing. Thank you and Charlotte. Hi Lucy, lovely to see you again, Rehema.

Charlotte Bonner:

My name is Charlotte Bonner and I am the CEO of EAUC, the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges, and primarily a membership body of post-16 education organisations across the UK and Republic of Ireland. We exist to lead and empower and support the sector to embed sustainability in everything that it does, so that we're acting as responsible organisations, we're equipping students for their lives and futures and that we're fundamentally shaping society for the better. And we do that through a combination of membership support services, through convening networks and communities and by influencing systems change to create a more enabling environment for this work.

Lucy Leake:

Brilliant. Thank you so much and welcome. I'm really excited to be having this conversation with you today and we've got some big questions that we're going to address. That we're going to address. I think we framed this in thinking about how institutions can keep sustainability as a priority in light of the challenges that currently face the sector. But actually I think maybe it would be good for us to start with why it's so critical that institutions do keep sustainability at the heart of what they're doing. So I wondered could I just throw that question out there as a kind of starter?

Charlotte Bonner:

they're doing so I wondered could I just throw that question out there as a kind of starter. I can start yeah, I don't mind. Either way. It's, um something that we talk about an awful lot in terms of why this agenda is so important, and I think when you hear the word sustainability, just that that means a lot of different things to different people. Um, right now in the sector, for a lot of people it's about financial stability of um the sector. For many people it immediately kind of turns to the green agenda and people think about the bins and the light bulbs and how we operate our organizations.

Charlotte Bonner:

But for me, the sustainability agenda and how it interrelates with with higher education is is much broader than that and much deeper than that too, and some of this is about recognizing, kind of the core purpose of our education system. Um, and again, that that is something people have different opinions about, but we know that there's roughly seven million learners in post-16 education at any one point across the country. We need to make sure that their education is equipping them well for their futures, for their lives. In some cases you could argue for their careers too. Again, that's one that sometimes gets a bit more political, but you know, in terms of how we're preparing those learners, how we're educating them with not just knowledge, but with skills and with competencies and capabilities that help them navigate the world that they live in now as well as the future. I think that's a critical, critical function of our education system, and one that, if we do well with regards to sustainability, we are going to be much better equipped to solve the sustainability challenges that we face, and by sustainability I'm not just talking about the environmental challenges, but but there's kind of broader social and cultural, um economic challenges too. I talked a little bit about jobs and and for many people in the sector you know they go into education to help support their future careers, and we know that there there are, of course, green jobs, but what that means is another area for for conversation. But any job has the ability to be done in a way that is harmful to sustainability and in a way that is positive and helpful to sustainability. So developing the workforce of the future, so that that's something that is more positive, is more helpful, um is definitely a role that I think education has.

Charlotte Bonner:

There's a piece around the reach of the education sector too. We reach every town, every city in the country, and there's a piece around supporting communities, that economic prosperity, that community health piece that we have to, whether that's through public engagement, whether that's through just just transition work um, our sector has a huge responsibility to play. Whether that's through public engagement, whether that's through just just transition work um, our sector has a huge responsibility to play. And that's before we get into the research and innovation piece. You know, our sector is the home of where we develop new thinking, new knowledge, new technologies and new solutions, and then we also have that massive role to play in place and placemaking. So I think all of those are functions of our education system and we can do them in a way that further exacerbates the challenges that we face currently, or in a way that helps solve them.

Charlotte Bonner:

And I think, for many people, education is about creating a better future, you know, whether that's for individuals, whether that's for communities, whether that's for society, and so, in terms of why education institutions should be engaging with the sustainability agenda, it's because it has the ability to transform pretty much everything that they do in a way that is hugely positive for the people that rely on that education system. How did I do Rehema?

Rehema White:

what did I miss? I think that's really beautifully said, and what else do I have to say so? So I want to pick up on that endpoint in a way. David Orr said that many of the problems we have in today's society were created by people who have PhDs and MBAs and who are graduates from our most prestigious higher education institutions. So I absolutely agree. A part of this is higher education institutions not doing very much more harm, if at all possible, and actually orienting themselves towards sustainable futures and not towards less sustainable futures. But I also agree that the part of this is about thinking about what is the purpose of a university and what is the purpose of a higher education institution in today's world, and so many of them are placemaking.

Rehema White:

But now we are in a globalised context for education and many of the students that we have here at the University of St Andrews come from other parts of the world. So our universities have massive impact in place, but they also have massive impact as these locations, where often young people, sometimes mature students as well which is fantastic come together from different parts of the world to together explore the kinds of futures that we might want to have and what kinds of pathways we might pursue to get there. So, fundamentally, this is about what is the purpose of our institutions today. We want to have that kind of knowledge sharing within the classroom, but education and teaching are not dissociated from learning. So if we want to create these knowledge hubs, these knowledge hubs that draw in different perspectives and ideas from around the world that can actually address some of the global challenges we have as well as some of the local problems that we have, higher education institutions are critical and sustainability is really core to the way we think about that.

Rehema White:

I think this idea about thinking about sustainable futures as well I really loved that you brought that up, because that brings in not just the technological disciplines who might want to say, how do we create new renewable energies, how can we develop conservation programs, how can we consider blue carbon in the oceans? But also the humanities. And we have some fantastic examples here of people in the classics who are looking back at civilizations and civilizations that fell and learning from that and from what that means for us as humans and as a species. And we also have people who are looking forward and saying using the arts and to be able to imagine different possibilities and to draw people into those kinds of possibilities. So this is far more than just about producing some topics in the classroom. This is a real ethos around what we want our higher education institutions to be, and I'm sure we'll come back to the classroom a little bit later in this conversation.

Lucy Leake:

That's brilliant. Thank you both. I actually what I heard from what you were both saying is that this isn't something that can just happen by itself. This is really about working in partnership across an institution, but across a body of students and across different countries and different institutions, and certainly when you're talking about things like the humanities and the creative arts, there's a real chance for both staff and students to work in a way that is socially engaged, for both staff and students to work in a way that is socially engaged and, you know, working in partnership with local communities, with industry, so that we're not working in silos of higher education. We're actually kind of working in the real world and making real change.

Lucy Leake:

So this all sounds very positive to me. So far, it's fabulous. Far it's fabulous. So, in the face of kind of the sector-wide challenges that we're faced with at the moment, which is a kind of post-brexit, post-covid financial instabilities I think we've already mentioned but how do institutions keep that sustainability agenda in priority? How are we going to make that not a luxury but something that is critical? Rehema, do you want to start us with this one?

Rehema White:

Yeah. So in some ways I get a little bit nervous when we talk about it as being the sustainability agenda, because I don't think it's an add-on, but I agree that so many people see it as this luxury that we might add on. But I think it's really fundamental to thinking about what we want to be as higher education institutes, how we want to operate, who we want to draw in to our different programs, how we want to run those programs, what the content of those programs is and the kinds of competencies we would like to support our graduates with when they leave. So I think it is a really fundamental aspect that falls through all of these and I think there are lots of different debates going on and I know it can feel very difficult if you're an academic and you're having to deal with decolonizing the curriculum and quality education and transitions in education, all these different aspects but to me they are interrelated in different kinds of ways and, for example, education for sustainable development overlaps with this notion of quality education and it actually provides ways that we can think about and we can activate and practice quality education looking at innovative pedagogies, looking at some of the different ways in which we can support authentic assessment, for example, and I think, when it comes to being forward thinking and engaging with aspects such as decolonizing the curriculum, that absolutely aligns with education for sustainable development and thinking about how we can create just learning experiences for people now, but how we can also learn about and for a more just society, and part of that is around reflecting what went on in the past and making that visible and creating a safe space for critical debate about that moving forward.

Rehema White:

If I can just make one more example where I think it's really relevant and that is talking about political literacy and around the quality of information that we have At the moment we have a situation where there is a denial of the expertise of scientists and a democratization of knowledge, which is really welcome through the onset of the internet, but also a risk that AI is putting out misinformation and a risk that, through some of the social media interactions that people are having, that they are less aware of some of the wider debates and multiple perspectives that are out there. And education for sustainable development and the way that we think about our higher education institutions allows us to bring that into the classroom and to develop the skills to understand the sources of the knowledge that we're looking at and the capacity for interaction and great critical assessment of what we're actually seeing.

Rehema White:

Yeah which is absolutely crucial, isn't it?

Lucy Leake:

Absolutely crucial, Charlotte? Do you want to expand on this?

Charlotte Bonner:

Yeah, I'm going to look at it from a slightly broader angle, I suppose, kind of looking at rather than from within an institution, looking at the whole sector, and I think one of the things that I find hugely frustrating and now have a responsibility for which is a big privilege, I suppose is how the extent to which sustainability is kept as a priority for the sector and I've worked in higher education in some way shape or form for 20 years and it sometimes feels we take one step forward, two steps back. We go around in circles a little bit and we have lots of false starts. We have lots of false starts because, largely, sustainability still is progressed by wonderful, wonderful, committed, thoughtful, passionate people and it isn't, I don't think, seen yet as a priority for the higher education sector as a whole. Where we see it, we see progress being made. Often it is because of wonderful people with great social capital, with great skills, with, with the right um being in the right place, the right time to make changes happen. But I see that as quite fragile change and we see lots of examples of people leaving a new, a new leader. Uh, leadership changes a new strategy for an institution and the sustainability work in the sector, to me, doesn't feel very stable, doesn doesn't feel very sustainable in its own right, and so I think, when we think about who holds responsibility for the sustainability agenda, I suppose, if I flip it on its head, the other thing I should say there is that, over that 20 years and I'm a newbie to the sector there are people that have been working in sustainability and higher education for far longer than I have, but pretty much everything that we've done to date hasn't been because there's been a big, heavy top down mandate.

Charlotte Bonner:

This is something the sector should be doing, but it's because people and individuals and students and institutions have said actually, this is really important to us, this is important to our learners, this is important to our mission, this is important to our remit. We can make good things happen. So we've got this weird situation where we've got institutions going, yep, this is really important, but it's not seen as a critical priority for the whole sector, which is why, in the face of financial constraints, people go, oh, this isn't nice to have, we'll save this for another day. And so I think, in terms of who has responsibility for keeping it as a priority, there isn't one source of responsibility. This is something that we need to start thinking about. How do we bake it in as a priority? And I think we can do things to facilitate great learner voice, and there will always be a demand for social responsibility and sustainability from learners.

Charlotte Bonner:

I believe I might be wrong, but I believe that that's there. It might be latent, it might be more activists in some places and more latent in others, but it's there. There's longitudinal data that backs that up. We know that this is important to society. You know our governments have committed to sustainability goals, um, in various different guises. We know that this is important to industry, although, again, that feels in flux at the moment because of the political situation. This isn't going to go away. At no point is society going to go. Oh yeah, we thought about doing that for a while. We tried it for a few years. It didn't really work. We're going to try something else. So how do we actually make this progress and how do we bake it in?

Charlotte Bonner:

And I think there's a responsibility there for anybody that therefore shapes and influences the education system, whether that's because they're part of it, for they work for an education institution or they're a student, or whether they work for a sector body.

Charlotte Bonner:

Uh, whether they're they work for one of the custodians of kind of the systems and frameworks that shape how our system operates and what we prioritize, and whether that's the QAA and I know the QAA have been bucket loads of stuff in this space and we were delighted at EAUC to see the latest version of the quality code have sustainability explicitly baked into it. But we'd really like to see that come from all angles so that it doesn't feel like it has to be one person's responsibility, but it is a shared commitment to the, the power that higher education has to contribute positively to sustainability, and therefore it becomes about okay, well, I, I have a connection to that sector. What's my role to play in this? So it's a bit of a bigger kind of I say provocation perhaps to to the question, but we need to do what we can to stop these false starts and this kind of one step forward, two step back piece, because, because of the urgency of the of the issues that we face, this isn't an agenda that that we have forever to contribute to.

Charlotte Bonner:

Whether you I immediately question myself for him as to whether I should call it an agenda you've made me think today. I've already written it down on my piece of paper. But this isn't, you know, we. We have a set period of time in which we can tackle some of these problems, so we need to be working with the urgency that is commensurate with the science that comes from our education institutions. You know, the climate scientists, the biodiversity specialists within our academic institutions are telling us we need to act and we need to act quickly, and I think we have a responsibility to them as a sector to say yeah, this is why you exist and this is our role in contributing to that, so that baking in is critical.

Rehema White:

Now we need to raise the bar.

Rehema White:

Yeah, I think I think again, that's wonderfully said. I want to sort of something you touched on. I'd love to pick up a little bit, and that is what happens to our graduates when they graduate, and many of some of them will be self-employed. Some of them will go into context where they are full-time carers or homemakers. That's fantastic, but many of them will go into employment and what we're seeing increasingly is that employers want graduates who have the capacity for the kind of world we live in now, which is one in which there are multiple forms of information coming at.

Rehema White:

People which require the critical capacities to be able to interrogate and synthesize across that. Which who require people who are personally resilient and can adapt to different kinds of contexts, who can work collaboratively, because so much more is done in teams and in groups and across partnerships now in employment and so and who can, who can be future thinking, who can recognize that the world just now is unpredictable and that when they come out they can't just have learned one fixed thing that will take them through their future careers. They need to come out of universities with the capacities and the competencies to be able to imagine and respond to different kinds of futures and to think holistically, within context, so that when one small thing changes, they can adapt within that as well. And we are seeing some of our professional bodies changing the kinds of requirements that they are placing on more vocational degrees, and I think that is a really good impetus for the sector as a whole. But I think sometimes perhaps employer voice could be a little bit louder and that connection between the graduates coming out and what is required could be there a little bit.

Rehema White:

This idea about the agenda Can I pick up on that just a little bit? I think sometimes there's a sense that sustainability is a topic. I think it is, I think it's a process, and so for the sector, it isn't just making sure people learn about sustainability, it's about ensuring that they learn for sustainability. Lots of different ideas and perspectives out there about what sustainability or sustainable development actually are, but I think that's a really key point. Again, it's learning. It's providing learning within the sector, which is around process and so focusing again on not just what's in the curriculum but the pedagogies and the kinds of assessment and the kind of engagement with real world issues that our students have.

Charlotte Bonner:

I think you're absolutely right, and it's something that Daniela Tilby often talks about. Sustainability isn't something to do, it's how we do things. It is that lens through which we can influence anything that we do. To some extent. It's a question we should be asking every time we make a decision, every time we initiate a new activity, every time we we review something that we're already doing what, to what extent, is this thing contributing to our sustainability goals or not? And I think, when it comes to kind of the learner piece and what, what esd looks like, you're absolutely right. The content bit is, to some extent, easy. Right, we can.

Charlotte Bonner:

Knowledge is, is everywhere. We know this, the facts about sustainability. It is about how do we help learners articulate their values and what that, what, how they relate to sustainability. How do we develop those competencies and analysts, many of which are long-standing within the higher education sector? Right, for 60 years ago, I would imagine, 120 years ago, I would imagine that the higher education institutions of the country said we are developing our students to be good thinkers, to be critically able to assess what's in front of them.

Charlotte Bonner:

But I think there's a gap there in terms of then how learners associate those skills with the sustainability with sustainable futures.

Charlotte Bonner:

And actually you could put a few other words in there too how learners recognize those skills as being useful to their roles as citizens, how learners associate their skills as being relevant to social justice and other other kind of really critical parts of society that we can influence or not. But if we know who we are, what skills we have, we can better understand what our role is in shaping the society that we want to be a part of. And we often see, in kind of research, lecturers say, yeah, we've got sustainability content in our courses, but that doesn't then parallel with learners saying, yeah, we're getting what we need from sustainability perspective. So I think there's a gap there and I think some of it is about that knowledge piece and some of it is about the extent to which those competencies are explicit in terms of how and helping learners make that gap to that jump to say, okay, I've developed these skills as part of my education. How can I now apply them? Yes, with my employer, but yes, in terms of how I want to live my values too.

Lucy Leake:

Yeah, amazing. And I wonder, charlotte in your experience with EAUC, have you seen powerful examples in institutions where they're getting this right there?

Charlotte Bonner:

are so many powerful examples of great ESD practice I really hate the phrase best practice, I think examples of effective practice that are working well in the context in which they are being applied by people who are exploring how to do that well. You know, I don't think there is a magic button that you can press and ta-da, esd has been done, and that's because, again, it's a complex thing to do really well. It needs great learner voice. It needs well-equipped educators to have the time and capacity to engage with what this means for them and their subject areas. It needs relevant you used a wonderful phrase about assessment systems, Rehema, but kind of really good quality assessment systems and we have lots of different ways of doing all of those things within our sector and across our sector. But we see a lot of great work being done in a few different areas. One is just by individual lecturers. There are hundreds of wonderful lecturers from across the span of academic disciplines across the country who are engaging with sustainability and thinking about how can I equip my math students, how can I equip my engineering students, how can I equip my classic students? I mean, I was a linguist donkeys years ago how do we equip our linguists to be able to understand the sustainability challenges that we face in a way that is relevant to their subject discipline, because that's a big piece that we know is important. It needs to be relevant. And then how do we think about how our skills, how our knowledge is useful to those, those solutions? And so we've got bucket loads of wonderful people across the eauc network and it's one of the things that puts a spring in my step. Um, in a few weeks time we're going to be coming together in sheffield for our annual conference and I know that I will leave just feeling completely inspired by the work that individual people are doing. And then we have a number of institutions that have set solid strategic aims around making that practice more universal, making these kind of sustainability competencies part of their graduate attributes, and are working to do that more holistically across their whole institution.

Charlotte Bonner:

Now, I think this is really hard. It's one of the reasons we haven't made as much progress as we should have done to date, because universities are big BMOs, organisations with lots of complexity in terms of how they're structured, lots of autonomy in terms of how the curriculum is developed and lots of influences on that curriculum, on pedagogical styles, pedagogical approaches, sorry, and so that's where I think we have still some good examples of institutional progress, but fewer of them and some of the work that I know Rahim has been involved in. Historically, some of the work that the collaborative funding that QAA have provided and Advance HE have provided as well, is helping us develop this practice in terms of understanding, in different contexts, what good ESD looks like, but we're definitely nowhere near a place where we can say this is being done comprehensively well. I don't I don't want to undermine any of our members, but I don't think there's an institution in the country that's willing to say, yeah, we're doing this really well.

Charlotte Bonner:

At the moment, all of our graduates are leaving with what they need to from a competency perspective, with regards to sustainability, and if somebody is listening who does feel like that, please get in touch, because I'd love to know what the steps are.

Charlotte Bonner:

But it's one of the things that we have responsibility for, I think, in terms of having that bird's eye view and looking at, well, what is working in different contexts and how can we help people take the next steps for for them and their roles and their institutions, and what can we learn about all of those different examples of effective practice. Where are their generalizations that we can say actually this kind of thing is working well for people, but it will always need to be adopted. It would always need to be contextualized. It will always need to be done in a in a way that is suitable for that institution. But we've got a few ideas now about pockets, but, Rehema, you've just contributed to a book that talks all about this, so perhaps it's a time to to hand over to you as to what some of those steps should be what a perfect opportunity to plug our book, so I did it for you.

Charlotte Bonner:

It's a great book.

Rehema White:

Yeah, thank you so much, charlotte, for that.

Rehema White:

So, yes, with a number of other colleagues, we've just put out a book called Perspectives and Practices of Education for Sustainable Development a critical guide for higher education, and I was one of the editors on this and one of the contributors to quite a few of the chapters. In the end, the book is out now. It's now published by Routledge, but we've just been negotiating an open access agreement so that I hope that anybody who wants to read it will be able to read it. Obviously, we would love it if everybody buys this book and if every senior manager had a copy of this book in their office. However, you will shortly be able to to access it for free as well, and there are loads of examples in this book, and, if I can just touch on a couple that came out, I think one thing that's really interesting is that every institution, as Charlotte said, is unique, and so they all have a slightly different flavor. So here at St Andrews, we have a fantastic transition university of St Andrews, which is a student group that engages with the local community and really has that bottom up approach for sustainability Been going strongly since 2009, but we now also have senior management. Commitment and sustainability is one of our pillars and trying to do a top down and bottom up and get everyone on side is quite exciting. Keele is fantastic for community engagement examples and their student action. Manchester Metropolitan is doing some really innovative things around thinking around education and assessment processes. University of West of England, bristol, has done some great things mapping what's happening and trying to bring the whole institution along. Southampton, simon Kemp is always speaking and enabling student voice to come on board. In Exeter, they've got some great examples of how research-led teaching, sustainability research is feeding in there.

Rehema White:

In Edinburgh, we have the Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development, which provides a kind of core base to engage out more widely with schools and with colleges, for example.

Rehema White:

So there are lots of examples where institutions and, as Charlotte says, often individuals within those institutions are doing really good things, and I agree I don't think there's such a thing as best practice.

Rehema White:

I think there are examples of good practice and none of us is quite there and will we ever be there. I think, as the world changes, this is going to be a dynamic context and thinking about education for sustainable development for me has been how do we continuously adapt the way in which we support teaching and learning in our different institutions. So there's good practice and there are places where you can see that. So the QAA website is actually one place where we have the guidance which is there for education for sustainable development. Also a number of resources and the regional centres of expertise are also putting up increasing resources and we're seeing much more literature now. So there are actually journals which are geared just towards education for sustainable development in higher education. We have EAUC runs a fantastic topic support network which is now renamed as a community of practice which was based in Scotland but we're now taking over the whole of the UK and actively trying to get some of those different, different voices involved.

Rehema White:

So there are lots of different ways in which people can share and learn from each other amazing.

Lucy Leake:

Thank you so much, Rehema. That's so so much great information and I think we should try and get that book onto every senior leader's desk not on the bookshelf, like right there on the desk.

Lucy Leake:

So it needs to be.

Lucy Leake:

I think you're right as well. There are so many pockets of good practice happening, effective practice even in in terms of smaller projects that are happening around compassionate assessment, things like inclusivity, inclusive approaches that aren't embedding inclusivity rather than reasonable adjustments yeah, I'm sorry.

Rehema White:

Can I pick up on that? Yeah, go on. Yes, I had noted that down as something we hadn't really talked about yet, which is, we started off talking about some of the challenges for the sector and some of the financial challenges, and it feels as though commodification of education has become the primary topic. And, yes, financial feasibility is incredibly important. Obviously, we are seeing some terrible things happening in some of our institutions because they're not financially able to maintain current processes, but we don't want commodification to take over and we want compassion to remain really important within that and some of that, education for sustainable development can facilitate compassionate ways of teaching and learning, but also compassionate ways of working collaboratively and not competitively for staff and offering different kinds of assessments. So there's a choice of assessment enabling different perspectives, different voices, different ways of engaging with the real world, so that we can, for example, create support for neurodiversity for students from different backgrounds and support the well-being of people in higher education sometimes experience eco-anxiety, and so we're having to try to not only say how terrible things are, but support learner and staff agency and learner and educator agency to be able to make changes and to be empowered through the education that they experience in our higher education institutions so that they can make a difference in the world yeah, oh, that's absolutely brilliant, absolutely

Charlotte Bonner:

right. I mean, I've done quite a lot of work in workforce development over the years, particularly in the further education sector, and working with different educators to look at where are, what are, the attributes of effective esd practice, recognizing that the context is so, is so critical, recognizing that there isn't kind of that best practice model, and I think there's a couple of things that are universal in terms of. I really believe that it needs to be relevant to subject subjects. We see a lot of institutions setting up kind of elective modules or sustainability modules that are open to all students, either on a compulsory basis as part of their induction or as an optional element to their course, and I think that's useful. I think it's a useful stepping stone, but it can't be the end result.

Charlotte Bonner:

Learners need really need to know how their subject relates to the sustainability challenges, the sustainability solutions we face. I think it does need to be explicit. I think for a long time we've had implicit sustainability content, not just from a knowledge perspective, Rehema, but also from a content in terms of the kinds of attributes we're looking to develop, but that doesn't always match with what learners believe that they have. So that explicit nature of how your competencies, how your capabilities, how the knowledge you have can contribute, and the other pieces around that solutions focus. That needs to absolutely be there, and I I'm a really strong believer in this.

Charlotte Bonner:

But I also recognize my privilege too. In terms of my I have had the ability to become a change maker. But I think that the ways that we can affect change are multifaceted, and being part of the solutions isn't something that you can only do if you carry a CEO badge, but it's something that any citizen, any person, can contribute to, whether that's talking to people about these issues, whether that's being an effective communicator, whether that's being an initiator of new pieces or whether that's being you know, there's so many different ways that people can contribute, but that solutions focus is absolutely critical. Otherwise, you'll just want to sit and lie with your head on your desk feeling sorrowful about the state of the world, which is something that I'm sure many people most people that work in the sustainability field from time to time. But the other thing I wanted to draw upon was around mechanisms for identifying and scaling up effective practice.

Rehema White:

But, Rehema, I think you wanted to come in on something else.

Rehema White:

Yes, so I can hear some of the people in my institution going.

Rehema White:

I agree with the solutions focus and the needing to address global challenges and local problems, but I also think there's a place for theory and there's a place for blue sky thinking.

Rehema White:

That was one reason why, at the very beginning, I said we need to be able to imagine different possibilities and and to to move towards those as well. But some, some of those possibilities will will never happen and we need to find ways of um not just being practice-based, of linking the way we think or or some of the ideas and processes in education for sustainable development to theory as well. And I don't think there's one kind of theory at all, because I think that is discipline dependent to some extent, and so there are ways of talking about sustainability that will be very different in geography, from social anthropology, from philosophy, from some of the classics in English literature, in all of these different kinds of places, as well as in biology and chemistry and physics. So a call out for those I know you would support this as well, but a call out for those who may think that I'm a theorist I don't really do solutions. Theory and practice have to link in our higher education institutions and beyond.

Charlotte Bonner:

Right, that's one of the reasons that we're not working at the pace that we we need to is because there's that theory and there's there's, there's reimaginings and that innovation, and then the knowledge that we're generating isn't translating into practice in wider society effectively enough. Because for a lot of the sustained challenges we face and again I'm coming in, I'm over the pragmatic functionalist really, but for so many of the challenges, we know what the solutions are, we just haven't implemented them. So kind of working, and it comes back to those kind of more human elements. There's more political sciences, the social sciences, the human resources. It's so critical for how we turn those, that theory, into practice. I think that there's an important role to play then. But I completely agree with you, Rehema, there's one type of academia that's important here. We need the, the whole wonderful shebang.

Lucy Leake:

I think the breadth of this conversation today has shown us that we need a part two of this. There is so much more that we could talk about. We haven't touched on interdisciplinary studies, on like a more holistic approach to education. We haven't talked about primary and secondary and how that needs to be the starting point coming through. So, as we do, we will need to close our conversation now, but I did want to ask you both maybe one last insight into, maybe what gives you hope right now that higher education can have a positive influence on sustainable I don't I'm trying to get away from saying the word agenda, let's think you need to do worse than that. Yeah, what gives you hope right now? Something in terms of the role that he can play?

Rehema White:

we're about to go into graduation and when I see some of those students walk across the stage, that gives me hope, because some of the students that we have graduated this year, I watch them walk into the future and I have hope. So that's some of our PhD students, some some the master students are not graduating just now, but some of the undergraduate students this year wow, they will be change makers in the future that is incredible.

Charlotte Bonner:

Thank you, Rehema charlotte so the question was framed as what gives me hope in terms of the role that he can play. I already think it does play a huge role, perhaps one that's under recognized, but across campuses, through the students that are currently learners, the graduates that are about to walk across that stage in their fabulous hats, in terms of the knowledge that we're generating, the innovative solutions. You go to any university in the country and you ask about how their research is contributing to sustainability futures. You talk to students who are involved in whether that's kind of co-curricular work or whether they're involved in, you know, courses like the ones, raheem, and you can't go to a campus and not be inspired and be full of hope of of the wonderful things that are going on at the moment and one of the best bits of my job, and it's it's. You know we've talked about how there isn't such a thing as best practice, so it does sit.

Charlotte Bonner:

I recognise there's a bit of a paradox there, but once a year we host the Green Gown Awards, which celebrate what's impactful and what's innovative across the sector, and I didn't know when I came into this job how much I would absolutely love that part of the work that the EAUC does, because it is a wonderful evening. It's an evening but it's a whole program. But to celebrate not just the winners but all those finalists, all those people that have applied and the the work that's going on, the breadth that's going on already gives us such a strong foundation, such a strong springboard to really amplify and scale up and work at more pace. But in terms of the role that it can play, we're already playing a huge role and that gives me hope and a bit of pride as well.

Lucy Leake:

Thank you so much, Charlotte. Thank you, Rehema. It's been a great conversation and let's carry it on.

Rehema White:

Thank you very much.

Lucy Leake:

Bye for now Bye.

Kerr Castle:

Many thanks to Charlotte and Rehema for joining us for this timely and insightful discussion. You can find a link to Rehema new book Perspectives and Practices of Education for Sustainable Development in the show notes, along with a range of practical resources to support sustainability in higher education. These include our newly revised 2025 subject Benchmark Statements, each of which embeds sustainability as a cross-cutting theme, as well as links to QAA-funded Collaborative Enhancement Project resources designed to support education for sustainable development across the sector. You'll also find our Education for Sustainable Development guidance, a key tool for helping UK higher education institutions embed ESD into their curricula, available via the show notes. Thanks again for listening. We hope you found the conversation valuable and we look forward to bringing you more content like this soon.