Events

Policy plays a crucial yet often overlooked role in shaping energy use, procurement, and transport demand in the education sector. As a result, scholars argue for reconfiguring national and institutional policymaking to reduce energy consumption and address climate change. However, core policies are often seen as non-negotiable at the local level, making it difficult to challenge policies that conflict with energy and climate policy goals. In this presentation, I address this problem by discussing findings from my doctoral research examining how core objectives and their underlying logics constrain progress towards net zero in England’s schools. Empirically, the research adopts a mixed-method approach informed by bricolage and includes a document review, an analysis of energy use datasets, and 35 semi-structured interviews with education policy stakeholders. Specifically, I will discuss how successive neoliberal policy reforms of schooling in England lead to the seemingly ‘natural’ view that stakeholders should prioritise improving educational standards over all other concerns in local governance, such as advancing net zero or health and well-being objectives. In response, I argue that the use of competition, choice and quantitative evidence of educational performance to govern schools is not inherently natural. Furthermore, I propose two strategies to challenge this dominant view of governance and reimagine schooling in alignment with efforts to advance sustainable transitions. First, I highlight how policymakers could adopt elements of other national education models that apply alternative approaches to school governance. Second, drawing on insights from the Philosophy of Mind, I illustrate how stakeholders can challenge the reliance on ‘hard’ evidence of educational performance in school governance, which restricts opportunities to address climate change in this context.