Outcomes for students
Students told us that taking part in the training and rating their courses had increased their expectations around sustainability learning and their sense of empowerment to influence courses.
“It hadn’t occurred to me how sustainability could be relevant in my field of study unless you were interested in going into environmental journalism but I think a lot of my classmates never think about these issues as they’re in positions where it doesn’t currently affect them. We would all benefit from this kind of education.”
UoG student rater
“Unsurprisingly, [the training] has made me more aware of how little sustainability is built into the learning I have experienced at an UG and PG level. For all the talk of sustainability that might occur in the classroom, it has rarely if at all gone beyond surface-level input. However, the content shared as part of this project has given me a sense of excitement for the steps that can be taken by course teams across institutions to rectify this and make sustainability a key feature of all courses.”
QAA SSAC student rater
The % of participants from each of the road-testing settings who explicitly flagged up this effect were:
- 45% of University of Gloucestershire
- 43% of King’s College London
- 31% of University of the Arts London
Outcomes for the team
The 3 different partner settings benefited from the project to inform how they move forwards on EfS:
- University of Gloucestershire – positively validation of the quality framework from an external and student perspective, with guiding insights into how students experience our EfS course offer.
- University of the Arts London – quality principles to strengthen their framework for climate justice in course design, supporting authentic wider embedding and auditing across the institution.
- King’s College London – quality principles that can be used to expand from an initial exercise in auditing around the UN global goals, to strengthen the EfS approaches in more courses.
Individual institutions may find stimulus for dialogue, strategic planning and progress monitoring in EfS through considering how the principles apply to approaches and developments in their setting.
University of Gloucestershire
University of the Arts London
King’s College London
Outcomes for the sector
The final rating framework and resources from this project offer a blueprint to the sector, to support an increased focus on quality and the pace of mainstreaming for EfS in university courses.
The principles and criteria provide a framework that supports rich qualitative conversations with students and course teams, to digest how sustainability can be infused meaningfully into any course specialism.
This framework also enables universities to make meaningful quantitative assessments of their progress in how they offer course experiences for sustainability and to seek consistency across their course portfolios.
Possible uses within the sector could include:
- For course teams and education developers – usable principles to guide course design activities and be able to see an aspirational and incremental approach to good quality EfS, grounded in real practice in diverse subjects and student input around how they receive and perceive EfS.
- For sustainability leaders and senior managers – a quality framework that gives direction to curriculum change initiatives, underpinned by an authentic and tested approach to EfS that has been adopted by academics and informed by students in a wide range of subject areas.
- Sector agencies and supporting programmes – an approach to understanding what quality EfS involves with translatable principles that can guide strategic planning, integration into frameworks and policy for best practice and initiatives that support and recognise universities developing EfS.
Project resources
View the final EfS quality blueprint and training tools.