Becoming a sustainable school - a research project

Working with the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester MEEN has completed a research project with Greater Manchester high and primary schools to discover how they plan to help the region reach its Zero Carbon target by 2038.

The aim was to find out whether members of the Senior Leadership Teams have a vision for 2038; what they have already done on the journey towards zero carbon; what the key challenges are and what help they need in order to progress. 

The research paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206251382722 and be cited as: Howes, A., Lock, R., & Meryll, L. (2025). Climate crisis, school leadership and critical systems thinking: Reconnecting action and consequence. Management in Education, 0(0).

Key observations affirmed research that has previously demonstrated that leaders lack the time, finance and training to address the issues. However, this research highlighted that there was a particular lack of understanding about scope 3 emissions, largely focused around school purchasing and in particular food. Consequently, we propose that being able to consider the climate crisis through applying critical systems thinking skills would be a highly beneficial approach. Schools are already embedded in multiple systems, such as supply chains or assessment regimes, and being able to re-frame them from the perspective of sustainability would enable a greater understanding of how to meet the Zero Carbon target.