Jess Rick is the environmental sustainability manager at The Sheffield College, a further education college with approximately 13,000 students who study vocational, academic and professional courses every year, including a sizeable adult education cohort. We spoke to her about how she is trying to embed sustainability throughout the college, from the buildings to the curriculum.
Can you give some background on your college?
The Sheffield College is a large general further education college. We have about 13,000 students on a variety of two-year, one-year and shorter courses. We have lots of access courses, there’s a higher education department and a sixth form, and we run a lot of apprenticeships too. We have several sites around Sheffield.
What’s your role and what responsibilities do you have for climate change and sustainability?
I’m the Environmental Sustainability Manager for the college. It’s a new post which sits in the estates department, but it’s a broad, cross-college role which includes the curriculum as well as the estate.
My role specifically supports the implementation and delivery of our Environmental Sustainability strategy that sets out the College’s objective of achieving Net Zero Carbon by 2040. I’m also responsible for helping our Academies to develop and build our “green” curriculum offer so that the skills needs of the future can be met.
Why is sustainability important to you and your college?
For me personally, it underpins everything. If we don’t have those basic ecosystems and the things that support life on the planet working properly, then nothing’s going to happen. It always comes back to the fact that we’ve got to survive.
In terms of the college, there’s a lot more emphasis on sustainability from the Department for Education. And of course there are many individual staff members who want to take action. And from the students’ point of view, they’re going to be living in our future world, so it’s really important that they have a functioning environment to live in.
Have you had any training around sustainability or climate education?
My background is environmental consultancy, from the estates side of things. I’m new to the education sector. Since I started here, I’ve done Carbon Literacy training, but for me it’s more about understanding the sector.
What activities have you undertaken at your college?
The first thing I needed to do when I started was to develop our Environmental Sustainability Action Plan, so I’ve used the FE (further education) roadmap framework for this. It encompasses teaching and learning, estates and operations, partnerships and engagement, reporting, and leadership and governance.
About 6 months after I started, we had a consultant come in for a week and spend time with all the curriculum teams. That highlighted lots of things that teachers are already getting on with in various courses. Quite a lot of the courses we run are inherently relevant, like land management and animal care. Many courses such as construction, catering and tourism include environmental content. Even the games development course had a project designing a tool for a company that removes plastics from the ocean.
A lot of the feedback we got from teachers was that if it’s not in the curriculum, it’s quite difficult to add extra content due to time constraints. But people are keen to use projects to include content on sustainability.
Our Building Technologies Academy have blazed a trail for us in terms of introducing new courses, because there is a lot of retrofitting going on around the city and a greater demand for things like installing heat pumps.
The other main feedback we got from the consultancy was that teachers need more training and more confidence to deliver content that they don’t know. So, we’re starting off with some Carbon Literacy training, but also looking at what CPD and industry-specific learning teachers need to be doing.
In terms of estates, we’ve made heat decarbonisation plans for the buildings. It’s not just the major investment pieces, but also the day-to-day operations, such as ensuring our major contracts include sustainability requirements.
We had an all-staff session on sustainability and people were talking about putting things in the right bins, but we need to think bigger! Huge change needs to happen. We need to think about what being sustainable means and where it sits in our priorities.
What barriers have you faced?
For teaching, it’s time, resources, training and confidence. For estates, it’s financial. It would take at least £10 million of investment over the next 15 years for us to fully decarbonise.
Another thing that’s been raised is that a lot of our students come to us with no knowledge of climate change or sustainability issues. Hopefully that’s going to change as it’s taught more in primary and secondary. Engagement with the students can be a barrier here because it’s difficult to get them interested in doing things outside of their course, as they’re working or busy.
Where do you find out about available funding and projects?
We’re members of the EAUC and get a lot of updates through that. I also find out about things through personal networking on LinkedIn and around Sheffield, talking to colleagues in other institutions.
Do you think what you’ve done could be replicated in other FE institutions?
I think so. A lot of the other colleges that I’ve spoken to in FE network meetings have smaller campuses and fewer students, so it’s a bit easier to implement things and communicate to all staff. If you’re getting buy-in at a senior level from different department heads then you’ll start to get traction.
