Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Charlotte Bonner, CEO of EAUC, about how the organisation has played a crucial role in centring the further education sector on sustainability and how the future needs an acceleration of this work.

EAUC is a non-profit membership organization driving sustainability across the UK and Ireland’s further education (FE) sector. It helps FE institutions embed sustainability into the core of their policies, processes and procedures while advocating for more supportive action at a legislative level.

“One of the things that we are working on much more explicitly these days is building sustainability into the business-as-usual of the education sector,” explains Charlotte Bonner, CEO of EAUC. “Making sustainability part of the DNA means institutions don’t think of sustainability as additional work they have to fit into their schedules. Instead, it becomes part of what they are delivering to students and communities. This is mirrored in our new strategy, in which one of the four strategic goals is to build this thinking into the framework of each institution.”

Although part of a new strategy, the goal builds on practices that some of EAUC’s members are already implementing.

“Some of it is about scaling what’s already there among our members, while some of it is about more effectively replicating and disseminating promising practices we already see in the sector,” says Ms. Bonner. “We do that through communities of practice, events, annual conferences, developing case studies, and other methods. Where there’s an established practice, we produce publications and guidance documents, meaning people or institutions new to a practice don’t have to start from scratch every time. It’s very resource efficient.

“That is also part of out attempts to create standardisation across the sector. Last year we published the standardised carbon emissions reporting framework, for example, which was a real flagship in EAUC’s portfolio. It set out what effective practice looks like across the sector whatever position or context you’re in if you have the right kind of data available to you.”

However, as Ms. Bonner explains, EAUC does face challenges such as how different its membership network can be:

“It’s challenging because we have real diversity across our members. On the one hand, we have some really excellent specialist institutions with small numbers of staff, students, and buildings. On the other, we have world-recognised universities with huge estates, hundreds of buildings, and tens of thousands of people in their communities. It is important to us that we’re providing support to that array of members. One way we’re catering to that is by providing frameworks of how to mature your practice, which recognises that people are starting in different places and working within different contexts.”

Bringing The Sector Together

EAUC provides training to industry professionals so that they can understand what sustainability means for their role. Significantly, this training goes beyond just the educators and researchers within the FE sector.

“We’ve just come to the end of delivering a course for educators in FE,” Ms. Bonner says. “That was conducted in partnership with the Education and Training Foundation and looked at what it means to be a teacher and deliver sustainability education well. It went over questions like what sustainability looks like within curriculum work, within learning progression work, and in assessments. It was very tightly tailored to the role of an educator.

“However, we’re also delivering similar courses to other important roles within the FE sector. We’ve partnered with the British Universities Finance Directors Group (BUFDG) to offer a similar course for financial professional in higher education. Next year, we’ll host a Leadership Lab aimed at helping and supporting change leaders in their achieving their goals within their institutions.”

EAUC’s approaches to fostering sustainability are as diverse as its own membership base.

“Another initiative we’ve taken is administering the Green Gown Awards, which recognize institutions for their impact on and innovation to sustainability,” says Ms. Bonner. “We use the awards to celebrate the hard work already done by colleges and universities but also to springboard further activity. Winning a Green Gown Award gives kudos and authenticity to your institution that can then be used to drive further action.

“At the same time, EAUC can use the awards to shape and steer the sector too. For example, a few years back we introduced a new category called Money for Good, which recognised the way that institutions invested and used their financial services to continue sustainability efforts. Just by introducing that category, we got people asking us what they need to do to win that award. It showed us how we can use the event to further embed sustainable practices into the sector.”

The CEO also explains that EAUC’s annual conferences also play an important role in holding the network and efforts together:

“Working in sustainability can be quite an isolated role. If you’re the person that wears the sustainability badge for the institution, it can sometimes feel like you’re trying to affect change against the stream, and that’s really difficult for people. EAUC brings those people together from across the sector so they can exchange ideas and learn from each other, but also so they can be among others like them. It provides space for assurances that there are other people in other institutions that are in a similar position.

“At the conference this year, someone said to me that it was so nice for them to not have to spend anything between two minutes and two months explaining to people around them what they are trying to do before they can even have a conversation about how to proceed with it. That shows that just bringing people together who share an objective, a vision, and have similar contexts is in itself really helpful for individual wellbeing as well as how effective they can be collectively within their institutions.”

Achievements

Looking back on 20 years of history, Ms. Bonner illustrates the important role EAUC has played in turning what was once an afterthought into a fundamental value today:

“Some of EAUC’s biggest achievements are things that we are still working on and improving. The sustainability exchange, for example, which is a central open source repository for people to publish their resources, expertise and tools for use by the sector is hugely ambitious. That type of aspiration and ambition is what has made EAUC so effective since it began. Nonetheless, the exchange needs tidying up and we’re about to embark on a major project to curate it and make it much more efficient.

“Retention and saturation of membership is another sign of EAUC’s success. The fact we have grown membership from a small group of interested parties back in 2004 to an organisation today that truly represents the breadth of the sector is a huge achievement. I also think some of the publications we created through our partnerships have been signifiant sector-wise. One close to my heart is the Climate Action Roadmap for FE Colleges, published in 2020. It was the first time that an FE-specific sustainability resource had been published for many years and it put the topic back on the agenda of many senior management teams.”

One of EAUC’s most important successes, though, has been its role in connecting institutional sustainability efforts with governmental policies.

“Our work as a convenor is something that we’re really proud of,” says Ms. Bonner. “When the UK hosted COP26 in Glasgow, the Department of Education hosted its first ever sustainable and climate change unit. EAUC did a really crucial job of bringing our members together to make sure their voices were heard in that space. We ensured that the FE sector was well represented in discussions around the role of education and how it can be an enabler of climate action alongside taking climate action ourselves.”

Plenty In The Pipeline

EAUC is building on this legacy to take it into the future. As the climate emergency becomes more pressing, the need for sustainability within the FE sector is only going to become more crucial. Ms. Bonner explains how EAUC has laid out a path to tackle this:

“We recently published our strategy taking us up to 2030. It offers a model that will help us affect change across the education sector, which we believe is more urgent now than ever before. What we really need to do is accelerate the pace of reach, engagement, impact, and ambition. We know the challenges we face are stark and time- bound, so accelerating that impact is really where we need to start putting our weight.

“Our strategy lays out a set of goals that will help us achieve that by being an excellent membership organisation, wide-reaching in our work, providing great insights to inform that work. That way we’re not just working on small pet projects but something that is meaningful and will create systemic change. This includes programs like the Climate Ambassadors program, which we’re delivering alongside the University of Reading, or the refining of the Sustainability Exchange that I previously talked about.

“We’ve come a long way in 20 years. Now we need to look after ourselves so that we can look after our members and achieve the goals we are aiming at over the next 20 years. We have so much in the pipeline and can’t wait to deliver on that.”