Sustainable development education in Scottish schools: the Sleeping Beauty syndrome

Abstract

This paper reviews and discusses the development of Sustainable Development Education (SDE) policy within the context of the Scottish formal school system. The focus is on the progress, and lack thereof, of implementation of SDE in schools in the light of some of the key curriculum documents and associated political decisions and advisory reports. The period of the review dates from 1993, which saw the publication of a report that was regarded as the seminal document for the development of environmental education in Scotland, to 2007 and the Scottish Executive's proposals for SDE in the light of curriculum reform for schools for the 21st century. The paper employs, loosely, the metaphor of the Sleeping Beauty to tell the story of SDE in Scotland in three parts: the story's three phases of emergence, obscurity and re‐emergence might serve as a useful metaphor, here.

Notes

1. Learning for life (1993) described a variation in terms, for example, environmental education, development education and sustainability education. The term Environmental Education was felt to be wide enough to cover all aspects of sustainable living therefore, the authors retained that term. However, in 1995 in the response document, A Scottish strategy for environmental education (1995), the recommendation was that the phrase education for sustainable development (ESD) be used. In 2004, the Scottish Executive's Sustainable Development Education Liaison Group adopted sustainable development education as the preferred term, thus its use in this paper.

2. For further details, see Sterling (2005).

3. Similar end results, for similarly complex but albeit different reasons, led to the mothballing of England's equivalent advisory and umbrella organization, the Council for Environmental Education, in 2005, following Government inquiries into sustainable development education by the UK Government's Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) in 2002–2003, and 2004–2005 (EAC, 2003, 2005).