HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, has launched a consultation around its plans to promote dialogue within the higher education sector on what more can be done to promote sustainable development. This time around, students are specifically invited to contribute to the discussion, which is a positive sign of the times. The Hefce blurb says:
Universities and colleges have for many years been making substantial reductions in carbon emissions through their teaching and research, through their business operations and through their influence on communities, staff and students. While evidence shows that many higher education institutions have successfully reduced their direct environmental impact in the past 25 years, the sector has challenging targets to meet by 2020 for reduction of carbon emissions. HEFCE’s framework for sustainable development sets out some of the ways that universities and colleges can contribute toward reducing their environmental impact, and how HEFCE can best support them.
Steve Egan, HEFCE’s Interim Chief Executive added:
‘Sustainable development is central to HEFCE’s work with the higher education sector. Students are eager for universities to maintain their high level of commitment to sustainable development, and we are looking carefully at what more we can do to enrich and support the sector’s work. We are committed to working in partnership with students and universities to maximize higher education’s contribution. There is much that everyone in higher education can do to promote a sustainable future by reducing carbon emissions, developing new technologies and changing behaviour.’
The key words here are carbon, students and behaviour.
What to make of this?
Well, for the past 10 years, Hefce has been persuading universities (think of being hit with bunches of carrots) to change institutional behaviour around carbon, and to think about (possibly changing if they really would like to) curriculum with sustainability in mind. Steve Egan has driven all this, and much has changed as a result. This consultation is the latest plan to change gear / direction / motive power / speed / whatever, as Hefce tries to get the sector to do more, and do it more effectively. The Council pussy-foots around curriculum, though, because what is taught and how, is, it stoutly maintains, a matter for institutions. As such its ambitions around sustainability and curriculum have to be vectored through a quite disinterested Higher Education Academy [HEA], and the broadly ignorant, but oddly keen, Quality Assurance Agency [QAA] which tries to act as something of a Trojan hedgehog rampaging around in the leaf litter in the last of the secret gardens.
It's all endlessly engrossing ...
Respond