Empower teachers to become sustainability managers at school

<< Background >>Our project was based on the fact that schools must act as a community in order to be an effective Sustainability player. The idea was based on international research, especially from Australia and the US, promoting the so-called “Whole-school approaches to sustainability”. Such studies were the first to define school sustainability at an organizational level, and set a foundation to the necessity of making schools laboratories for sustainability. Interestigly, few months later the project’s approval, the EU Commission endorsed the whole-school approach. Partners believed that EU schools should act in this direction too, and carried out a preliminary research among 75 high schools to ask how they could be supported in this transformation. The key points were: 94% of schools said that they lack coordination and there is no real school policy in place regarding sustainability at school; the same percentage stated that many green actions are carried out as class-based projects, but that such projects do not follow explicit guidelines; teachers were not prepared enough over the environment and sustainable approach. As for the students, teachers stated that they were highly motivated to be involved in Sustainable education. << Objectives >>We intended to achieve the following objectives:-analyse and identify the key areas needed for a school to turn into a “Sustainable school”; -prepare the schools to embrace the role of “Sustainability Manager” at governance and educational level; -raise awareness among headmasters on the importance of building a sustainability strategy involving the entire school; - prepare the entire school staff community on key topics regarding Sustainability, environment and climate change; -involve the entire school in the sustainable transformation process, from the governance to the school education staff and all relevant stakeholders; -increase awareness of teachers and students over Sustainability issues; -develop skills and knowledge of students and motivate them to embrace sustainable approaches, at school and at home; -let schools monitoring and tracking the afoot changes; -promote a “whole-approach” at school level, reinforce their capacity building and turn schools into a key drive for change, providing them with structured strategies to make in place.<< Implementation >>During the entire project, project management and coordination activities took place. We immediately activated communication channels with partners, and we implemented virtual meetings for cooperation and organizational activities to ensure administrative duties and tasks and clarify all the aspects about project management. In addition to the online meetings, three physical meetings took place in Rome (17-18 February 2022), Prague (20-21 June 2022) and Mons (11-12 June 2023).We followed project results monitoring and budget monitoring to evaluate the activities and other results, measure the effectiveness on users and other quality and evaluation tools. We also followed dissemination activities to highlight the project on internal and external channels. At the end of the project, we realized multiplier events in all Europe to disseminate the final results.Partners started their work with the development of the benchmark analysis and materiality report. This is the first step of any CSR practice, and it is an analysis and research activity to identify the key stakes relevant for any Sustainable School. It is important to say that in the project, we embraced the most comprehensive concept of Sustainability, which is not only related to environment but to many other areas.Under the supervision of Formethic, partners started to search for the best practices on sustainable strategies at school in Europe, identifying 5 best practices per partner, 25 in total. We collected the best practices into the “Good practices booklet on sustaible approaches at school”. The second step was to focusing on the stakeholders maps in the school field, understanding which are the key stakeholdors for school at national and European level. We distributed a survey to 70 stakeholders by each partner and carried out interviews. We collected more asnwers than expected, 480 in total. Based on such results, Formethic team worked on the elaboration of the benchmark and materiality report, while Euphoria Net took care of the graphic aspects of both the best practice and materiality reports. All partners were involved in the internal revision, and all with exception of Formethic translated the resources. Thanks to these results, we identified the 18 priority areas related to Sustainability for the school educational world, and we based the development of the following results on such fundings.The Materiality report explains also the methodology used, and it is a model to follow for schools that would like to implement such methodology to identify their key stakes (in addition to the specific tools created in the Tool-kit).During the Summer 2022, all partners started to identify and select their Ambassador schools, an associate school with the role of implementing and showcasing the Sustainable model we were creating. We started to set the structure of the Tool-kit, which is a package with instruments that schools can follow and re-use to create their Sustainability Strategy. First, we created a document setting- up the Strategy in all its steps, with an explanation of all the process, from the selection of the Sustainability Manager, to its job-description, to the various steps to implement the Strategy itself.Then, we created the challenges and the escape rooms, which are the tools to implement the Strategy. Once all the Strategy was set-up, we created some additional practice sheets, which are very handful tools that schools can use to replicate the strategy.In the meantime, we also started the creation of the e-learning to prepare school education staff and key stakeholders to implement the Sustainability Strategy. SmartNest created the website hosting the learning platform and then provided the storyboards and templates to fill-in with information to be then transferred into e-learning modules. All partners wrote a module (What is Sustainability-Logopsycom; Sustainability Management at school-Smart Nest; How to set-up a Sustainability Strategy at school-Euphoria; How to implement Sustainability Strategy-SmartNest; How to monitor the Sustainability Strategy-Formethic) and reviewed it internally,and with exception of Formethic, translated the content. Smart Nest was in charge of uploading online all the e-learning.Starting from November 2022, all this creation process was accompanied by the testing of the resources done by the Ambassador schools. The Ambassador schools have tested all our results, provided bottom-up feedback, and were actively involved in the results’ creation. Indeed, we have organized a call all together to know them and start gathering their feedback. They have also participated to the Mons meeting, during which we gathered live feedback on escape rooms and monitoring tools. They have also implemented the activities in their classes and built their Sustainability Strategy.As for all the results, Smart Nest was in charge of their online upload and layout on the website in all languages (English, Italian, French, Czech and Latvian).<< Results >>The concrete output of the project was to create a set of tools to facilitate the creation of Sustainability Strategies at school, under the Supervision of a Sustainability Manager.Such process implies a real change in schools’ mindsets, which are encouraged to think strategically and embrace a whole-school approach to make them a real driver for change.We have created the following three results:-A benchmark analysis and materiality report (R1) to focus on the key stakes relevant for any Sustainable School. When we refer to a “whole-school approach”, it is strategic to understand the different aspects of schools to be treated as priority to endorse sustainable principles and turn them into practice. For this result, we have created a “Good practices booklet on sustaible approaches at school” with 25 best practices selected by all partners, and a Materiality Report, which is a fundamental process in any Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) framework. This study aimed to identify schools stakeholders and interview them about their vision on sustainability issues. 480 stakeholders in 5 European countries have been interviewed. The results allow to establish a materiality matrix with all issues according to their impact on schools performance and stakeholders’ expectations. This study helped to rank and choose the main issues that were treated in the repository of best practices, the development of online courses, the challenges and escape rooms proposed and the guidelines to develop and implement a CSR strategy at school level. These two documents, which are the basis of all our project, are available in 5 languages (EN, FR, IT, CZ and LV).-A model and tool-kit (R2) to establish a sustainability strategy at school, composed of resources to create a school community with the involvement of students and teachers, to track the changes and to transfer to students key knowledge regarding sustainability and climate change, and how their behaviours impact the entire system. The tool-kit is composed of: the Sustainability Strategy document, which represents the description and the explanation of the overall process; 3 escape rooms (one for the School education staff to set-up the Strategy, and two to play with students collectively) and 25 challenges (divided according to the difficulty in basic, medium and advanced), which are the core instruments to implement the Strategy at school level; various practice sheets to help teachers in replicating the process and having ready templates to fill-in and use (a powerpoint template to fill-in to create your Strategy and present it to colleagues and stakeholders, a template to create your stakeholder maps, a sample of survey to analyse the needs of your school, a document and an Excel file explaining how to make the materiality assessment and identify your school needs, a check-list to verify if you completed all the steps, and the ready presentations of the Ambassador schools as sample); a monitoring and track tool to monitor the strategy. The result is available in 5 languages (EN, FR, IT, CZ and LV).-R3 is an e-learning to prepare schools’ sustainability managers and other staff to learn about key topics and how to act to implement green strategies at school. The course is composed of 5 modules: 1) What is Sustainability; 2) Sustainability Management at school; 3) How to set-up a Sustainability Strategy at school; 4) How to implement Sustainability Strategy; 5) How to monitor the Sustainability Strategy. The course does not need any registration and can be accessed by everyone. We suggest to follow the order of the modules, but users can jump to any module according to their needs. The result is available in 5 languages (EN, FR, IT, CZ and LV).In order to facilitate the use of our results, and to let schools replicating the overall Strategy and processes, we have decided to display the results not according to the division of the application form (R1-R2 and R3) but proposing to the schools a real step-by-step process to follow and implement following our results.In this page (STEP-BY-STEP TOOL-KIT | SchoolSustainability (school-sustainability.eu)), you will find:STEP 1: PREPARE AND TRAIN THE SUSTAINABILITY MANAGEMENT TEAM (composed of R1, R3 and the Sustainability Strategy which is part of R2)STEP 2: IMPLEMENT THE STRATEGY (composed of the various practice sheets, escape rooms and challenges of R2)STEP 3: MONITOR THE STRATEGY (composed of the monitoring tools of R2)STEP 4: TAKE INSPIRATION BY THE AMBASSADOR SCHOOLS (composed of other practice sheets of R2)This is also due to the fact that our results are strictly interconnected: R1 is the basis for any strategy, and it is also the basis for the implementation of the model (R2); the same can be said for R3, as a proper preparation for the staff is key to start the Strategy implementation.