What Are Schools For?

Can an education system that cannot hold responsibility for the future still claim to be educating at all? A Green Edge Guest Post.

Conversations about sustainability in education are growing louder, yet they continue to sit at the margins of school life. This week, The Green Edge is pleased to present a guest post from Simon Lightman who argues that the problem is not a lack of commitment or awareness, but a deeper misalignment between sustainability and the structures that define educational purpose, accountability, and leadership. Drawing on insights from systems thinking and institutional change, he suggests that sustainability challenges schools to confront what education is really sustaining—and whether systems designed for short-term performance can take responsibility for the futures they help to shape.

Simon is Head of Philosophy and Politics at a UK independent school and describes himself as “an educator, writer, and systems-change practitioner working at the intersection of sustainability, education, and youth governance, with a particular interest in questions of educational purpose, ethics, and long-term flourishing”.

Alongside his teaching day job, Simon works with schools, networks, and civic partners on whole-school approaches to systemic change. He is also a trustee of the Sustainability and Environmental Education Trust.

Simon recently helped coordinate a cross-sector open letter to the Department for Education, Ofsted, and the Education Select Committee in response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, calling for sustainability, systems thinking, and intergenerational fairness to be embedded at the heart of future learning.

What Are Schools For?

Over the past year, conversations about sustainability in education have gathered momentum again. Curriculum renewal, climate education, youth voice, and intergenerational fairness are all being discussed with renewed urgency, as schools attempt to navigate a world shaped by ecological instability, social fragmentation, and growing uncertainty about the futures young people are inheriting. Alongside this, there has been a noticeable increase in professional reflection—across essays, podcasts, and policy conversations—asking not simply what schools should teach, but what they are ultimately for.

Yet for all this activity, a familiar frustration remains. Sustainability is talked about more often than it is embedded. It appears in strategy documents, themed weeks, student projects, and enrichment offers, but it rarely reshapes the core structures of schooling. When pressures rise—as they inevitably do—sustainability tends to slip. This is not because school leaders or teachers do not care. It is because the system itself struggles to hold it.

This tension points beyond curriculum design or policy alignment and towards a deeper question that sits beneath both. What kind of education system are we actually sustaining, and who, or what, does it currently serve?

The Sustainability Squeeze

In most schools, sustainability is carried by committed individuals. Teachers give time and energy, students organise campaigns, leaders endorse initiatives. Much of this work is thoughtful, creative, and sincere. At the same time, though, it is often fragile. When timetables tighten, examination demands intensify, or inspection looms, sustainability is usually the first thing to be squeezed. This pattern is often explained in personal terms, through narratives of overload, capacity, and competing priorities, all of which contain elements of truth. However, focusing only on individuals risks missing something more fundamental.

Schools are not neutral containers into which new priorities can simply be placed. They are complex institutions shaped by what they are required to timetable, assess, inspect, and report. Over time, these structures stabilise particular values and ways of seeing, until they begin to feel natural or inevitable. What sits outside them is not simply optional—it is precarious. This is why sustainability initiatives so often struggle to endure. When responsibility rests on individual champions rather than institutional design, it remains exposed. Staff move on, leadership priorities shift, initiative fatigue sets in, and sustainability—while still visible and often celebrated—rarely becomes durable.

In this sense, sustainability does not fail because schools are doing something wrong. More often, it falters because schools are doing exactly what they have been designed to do.

Education Shapes

To understand why this matters, it helps to step back from questions of provision and instead ask a more fundamental one. What does education actually do? Education is often described as preparation, preparation for exams, for work, for life. Yet education does more than prepare. It forms. It shapes how young people come to understand themselves, others, and their responsibilities within the world they inhabit. Long before students encounter explicit lessons about ethics, citizenship, or sustainability, they are already learning what matters through the rhythms, priorities, and structures of school life.

Every education system forms habits of attention. It implicitly teaches students what deserves care and what can be overlooked. It shapes assumptions about success, responsibility, and value. Whether or not this is acknowledged, schooling is always formative. There is no neutral position.

Cultivating a new Education Ecosystem

At this point, it is also worth pausing on what is often meant by placing the learner at the centre of education. Much contemporary educational language, including that used in sustainability education, still treats the learner primarily as an individual unit of capacity, knowledge, or resilience to be developed. While this framing has been important in challenging narrow, content-driven models of schooling, it also carries a risk. When the learner is reified as an isolated subject, responsibility for navigating social, economic, and ecological breakdown is subtly shifted onto individuals, rather than held collectively and institutionally. Education becomes about equipping young people to cope, adapt, or compete, rather than about shaping the conditions in which shared life can flourish.

A different horizon is needed. One that understands learners not as autonomous units to be optimised, but as relational beings, formed through—and formative of—the social and ecological systems they inhabit. From this perspective, education is not primarily about maximising individual potentials, but about cultivating the capacities, dispositions, and forms of responsibility required to sustain communities, democratic life, and the living world over time. Learning, in this sense, is ecosystemic—always situated, always relational, and always entangled with the futures it helps to bring into being.

This is where sustainability poses a deeper challenge. It cannot be reduced to additional content or improved awareness. Instead, it asks schools to attend to relationships that stretch beyond the immediate and the measurable: relationships to future generations; to communities not yet formed; and to the living systems on which all social and economic life ultimately depend.

Systems designed primarily to reward short-term performance struggle to hold this kind of responsibility. What cannot be easily measured or audited tends to fade from view. Over time, responsibility itself becomes narrowed, reduced to what can be evidenced, inspected, and reported, and care quietly erodes as a result.

The Safeguarding++ Precedent

There is, however, an instructive precedent within education. Take safeguarding, for instance. Safeguarding was not always the integrated responsibility it is today. Two decades ago, it was often treated as a narrow, technical concern, owned by specialists and addressed through discrete procedures. Over time, that changed. Safeguarding became embedded because the system accepted the simple truth that some responsibilities are too important to be optional. Once that shift occurred, safeguarding moved from the margins to the centre of institutional life, shaping leadership decisions, staff training, policies, and everyday practice. No serious school leader would now describe safeguarding as an add-on.

Sustainability asks for a similar shift, but it is also more demanding. While safeguarding is primarily concerned with present risks and identifiable harms, sustainability asks schools to take responsibility for future conditions. It requires institutions to act on behalf of those who are not in the room: future students, future communities, and the natural systems that will sustain them. This raises an ethical problem that is easy to overlook. Decisions are always being made on behalf of someone else. When future generations and the more-than-human world are not explicitly represented in decision making, they are not neutral bystanders. They are structurally absent, and therefore structurally overridden.

A Seat at the Leadership Table

What becomes particularly striking in conversations with young people is not only their concern about climate change itself, but their sensitivity to institutional contradiction. Students notice when sustainability is spoken about with urgency in assemblies, lessons, or public statements, yet quietly sidelined in timetables, assessment priorities, and leadership decisions. They notice when care for the future is framed as a personal virtue, something to be demonstrated through individual behaviour or extra-curricular effort, rather than as a shared institutional responsibility. Over time, these contradictions teach powerful lessons—not about sustainability in the abstract, but about how institutions actually work. If schools are among the places where young people learn how society organises responsibility, authority, and care, then the marginalisation of sustainability becomes formative in its own right, shaping expectations about agency, accountability, and whose interests ultimately count.

It was this gap, between rising urgency and limited institutional capacity to respond, that led me, alongside colleagues across education, research, and civil society, to help orchestrate a recent cross-sector open letter to the Department for Education, Ofsted, and the Commons Education Select Committee. The letter emerged as a response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review and to a growing sense that without clearer alignment between curriculum, accountability and long-term responsibility, sustainability would continue to sit at the margins of school life. Its purpose was not to call for radical overhaul, but to signal that meaningful change will remain elusive while sustainability is treated as an addition rather than a lens through which educational purpose, leadership, and governance are understood.

This is where the idea of giving nature, and the future, a seat at the leadership table becomes more than a metaphor. It offers a way of thinking about how responsibility is distributed within institutions. Leadership always represents someone. Budget decisions, curriculum choices, building projects, partnerships, and priorities all speak on behalf of particular interests and futures. The question is not whether representation is happening—it is about whose interests are being represented by default.

Educating the Future

Some schools are beginning to explore this more deliberately. They are creating leadership roles or cross-school structures that bring together students, staff, governors, and community partners; not to run projects or add initiatives, but to ask better questions, like: How does this decision affect our local environment? What does it model about responsibility? Who benefits now and who bears the cost later?.

These are not technical questions. They are ethical ones, and they sit at the heart of leadership.

None of this removes the very real pressures schools operate under. Accountability, inspection, parental expectation, and progression routes shape daily decision making in powerful ways. Pretending sustainability can flourish without engaging these structures is wishful thinking. If sustainability is to move beyond symbolic inclusion, it must be aligned with the core systems that govern school life. Curriculum, assessment, leadership, and governance all matter here, not because sustainability needs to dominate everything, but because it speaks to the deeper question of what education is ultimately for.

At stake is not simply environmental knowledge or climate awareness. It is whether education systems can take responsibility for the conditions they are helping to create. Whether they can hold a moral seriousness that extends beyond immediate outcomes. Whether they can recognise obligations to people and worlds that cannot yet speak.

In the end, sustainability is not an ideological add-on. It is a test of institutional maturity. It asks whether education systems are capable of acting as stewards of the future, rather than merely managers of the present.

The question, then, is not whether schools can accommodate sustainability, but whether an education system that cannot hold responsibility for the future can still claim to be educating at all.

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The Green Edge thanks Simon Lightman for this guest post. Find more from Simon on his website and on LinkedIn.

Those wishing to add their support to the open letter can do so here:
Signatories (education, research, civil society): https://forms.gle/AT4bP9xheTb9vU577
Supporters (open to all): https://forms.gle/gdZvzdFkKY993vWt8