Six Quick Things on Leadership for Sustainability

Now is the time for leadership for sustainability.

It is an approach that requires a strategic mindset, a commitment to ethical practices, and the ability to inspire others towards long-term positive impact.

For all school leaders who know that something needs to change, here are six quick things to consider.

1. What Leadership for Sustainability Isn't

Sustainability Leadership involves activities like getting someone to lead a student Eco Council. Sustainable Leadership is making sure there is a system of succession planning for school leadership posts. Leadership for Sustainability is neither of these things.

2. Make Your School a Microcosm of a Better World

Leadership for Sustainability is about making your school a microcosm of a better human world that thrives culturally and economically, refusing to deplete and damage planetary resources. More than just the ‘Green Stuff’, it incorporates economic and social life – and justice.

3. A Whole-School Approach

Leadership for Sustainability involves the whole school, not just humanities or science or the gardening club. At the heart of the school’s vision and mission, it involves a school that is run on low carbon or even negative carbon lines, that adds to biodiversity and involves its community in sustainability actions, enriching the curriculum as it does.

4. Don't Fear the inspectors

Leadership for Sustainability need not fear the inspectors. It can deliver ‘school improvement' metrics in spades, but goes much further with wins in curriculum enrichment, critical thinking, cooperation and well-being.

5. Systems Thinking

Leadership for Sustainability involves Systems Thinking. This is a joined-up way of approaching the challenges – the ‘Wicked Problem’ – any school faces. It avoids those educational ‘silver bullet' solutions which are prone to unintended consequences.

6. Hope

At the heart of Leadership for Sustainability is the idea that we are all ‘part of the solution’. It creates the conditions for a genuine and realistic sense of hope. It builds the capacity for everyone to ‘Be The Change’. It’s not about heroic headline-grabbing actions, but acting with integrity, without fear and in a way that enables others to do the same.

All school leaders can be part of this important shift, if they choose to be.

Now is the time. [ITL]

Dr David Dixon is a former headteacher and the author of Leadership for Sustainability: Saving the planet one school at a time published by the Independent Thinking Press.

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Dr David Dixon, author of Leadership for Sustainability: Saving the planet one school at a time