Empower teachers to become sustainability managers at school

Our project was based on the fact that schools must act as a community in order to be an effective Sustainability player. The idea was based on international research, especially from Australia an...

We intended to achieve the following objectives: -analyse and identify the key areas needed for a school to turn into a “Sustainable school”; -prepare the schools to embrace the role of “Sustainability Manager” at governance and educational level; -raise awareness among headmasters on the importance of building a sustainability strategy involving the entire school; - prepare the entire school staff community on key topics regarding Sustainability, environment and climate change; -involve the entire school in the sustainable transformation process, from the governance to the school education staff and all relevant stakeholders; -increase awareness of teachers and students over Sustainability issues; -develop skills and knowledge of students and motivate them to embrace sustainable approaches, at school and at home; -let schools monitoring and tracking the afoot changes; -promote a “whole-approach” at school level, reinforce their capacity building and turn schools into a key drive for change, providing them with structured strategies to make in place.

During the entire project, project management and coordination activities took place. We immediately activated communication channels with partners, and we implemented virtual meetings for cooperation and organizational activities to ensure administrative duties and tasks and clarify all the aspects about project management. In addition to the online meetings, three physical meetings took place in Rome (17-18 February 2022), Prague (20-21 June 2022) and Mons (11-12 June 2023). We followed project results monitoring and budget monitoring to evaluate the activities and other results, measure the effectiveness on users and other quality and evaluation tools. We also followed dissemination activities to highlight the project on internal and external channels. At the end of the project, we realized multiplier events in all Europe to disseminate the final results. Partners started their work with the development of the benchmark analysis and materiality report. This is the first step of any CSR practice, and it is an analysis and research activity to identify the key stakes relevant for any Sustainable School. It is important to say that in the project, we embraced the most comprehensive concept of Sustainability, which is not only related to environment but to many other areas. Under the supervision of Formethic, partners started to search for the best practices on sustainable strategies at school in Europe, identifying 5 best practices per partner, 25 in total. We collected the best practices into the “Good practices booklet on sustaible approaches at school”. The second step was to focusing on the stakeholders maps in the school field, understanding which are the key stakeholdors for school at national and European level. We distributed a survey to 70 stakeholders by each partner and carried out interviews. We collected more asnwers than expected, 480 in total. Based on such results, Formethic team worked on the elaboration of the benchmark and materiality report, while Euphoria Net took care of the graphic aspects of both the best practice and materiality reports. All partners were involved in the internal revision, and all with exception of Formethic translated the resources. Thanks to these results, we identified the 18 priority areas related to Sustainability for the school educational world, and we based the development of the following results on such fundings. The Materiality report explains also the methodology used, and it is a model to follow for schools that would like to implement such methodology to identify their key stakes (in addition to the specific tools created in the Tool-kit). During the Summer 2022, all partners started to identify and select their Ambassador schools, an associate school with the role of implementing and showcasing the Sustainable model we were creating. We started to set the structure of the Tool-kit, which is a package with instruments that schools can follow and re-use to create their Sustainability Strategy. First, we created a document setting- up the Strategy in all its steps, with an explanation of all the process, from the selection of the Sustainability Manager, to its job-description, to the various steps to implement the Strategy itself. Then, we created the challenges and the escape rooms, which are the tools to implement the Strategy. Once all the Strategy was set-up, we created some additional practice sheets, which are very handful tools that schools can use to replicate the strategy. In the meantime, we also started the creation of the e-learning to prepare school education staff and key stakeholders to implement the Sustainability Strategy. SmartNest created the website hosting the learning platform and then provided the storyboards and templates to fill-in with information to be then transferred into e-learning modules. All partners wrote a module (What is Sustainability-Logopsycom; Sustainability Management at school-Smart Nest; How to set-up a Sustainability Strategy at school-Euphoria; How to implement Sustainability Strategy-SmartNest; How to monitor the Sustainability Strategy-Formethic) and reviewed it internally,and with exception of Formethic, translated the content. Smart Nest was in charge of uploading online all the e-learning. Starting from November 2022, all this creation process was accompanied by the testing of the resources done by the Ambassador schools. The Ambassador schools have tested all our results, provided bottom-up feedback, and were actively involved in the results’ creation. Indeed, we have organized a call all together to know them and start gathering their feedback. They have also participated to the Mons meeting, during which we gathered live feedback on escape rooms and monitoring tools. They have also implemented the activities in their classes and built their Sustainability Strategy. As for all the results, Smart Nest was in charge of their online upload and layout on the website in all languages (English, Italian, French, Czech and Latvian).