What does ESD have to do with current school issues, like Every Child Matters (ECM)?
Every Child Matters has five key outcomes for children and young people:
- Being healthy – enjoying good physical and mental health and living a healthy lifestyle
- Staying safe – being protected from harm and neglect and growing up able to look after themselves
- Enjoy and achieve – getting the most out of life and developing broad skills for adulthood
- Making a positive contribution – to the community and to society, not engaging in anti-social or offending behaviour
- Economic well-being
Source: Every child matters: next steps, DfES, 2004
Education for Sustainable Development is very much concerned with reaching these outcomes. To take the obvious first, it is difficult to be healthy in an unhealthy environment. Helping our students understand the links between their health and the health of natural systems is key to the first outcome.
Schools have long aspired to develop the independence of their students, as laid out in staying safe. ESD espouses learning which enables students to become effective critical thinkers and decision makers. This leads straight into the ‘broad skills’ required if they are to enjoy and achieve. In a rapidly changing world students will need to see its underlying interconnectedness. ESD helps build a new set of transferable skills, related to social learning, collaborative working and systems thinking – all of which will be needed to succeed in the 21st Century.
If students are encouraged to participate in decision making in schools, they will be more active participants in their wider community. Likewise, if the wider community is encouraged to be involved in school life the school will have more to offer its students and a positive contribution can be made both ways. Effective community engagement is a cornerstone of ESD.
Finally, economic well-being, a concept which could be seen to be at variance with the sustainability agenda, but if this is to be achieved for all then issues such as social equity and inclusion must be addressed. Again ESD can offer strategies for schools to consider these, both in the classroom and in the ethos of the school.