Student voices: Business Sustainability Management

Developing Sustainability Education in Trusts and Schools

We sat down with past-student Paul Edmond, Chief Finance Officer at Heart Academies Trust, to understand more about his motivations for joining CISL's Business Sustainability 8 week online course, and the outcomes and experiences that made this programme valuable for him.

What motivated you to attend the Business Sustainability Management course at CISL?

What motivated me to join CISL was working in education. I am the sustainability lead for a multi-academy trust consisting of primary, secondary and sixth form. As a sector we had a strategy developed by the Department for Education in 2021-2022. However, we didn’t have much training, support and knowledge within the sector to act upon the strategy effectively. There are short courses available but as a sector we need something with more depth and knowledge to bring skills in and then be able to share them not just within our own trust but to share them across a variety of schools. To an extent we can then support the Department of Education’s ambition to decarbonise the sector and improve our sustainability and the overall impact on the environment. This was the reason for finding the CISL course, as it’s a course with a lot more depth and more breadth in terms of what it covers but its also bringing in knowledge, skills and best practice the business private and university sector and other sectors that are further ahead than we are. We need to use that knowledge and think about how we apply that to our own settings to accelerate and catch-up supporting lots of small schools that don’t have the in-house capacity to do some of this work.

What challenges were you facing at the time, and how did the course help you to overcome these?

The biggest challenge in the sector is the lack of knowledge and understanding. Not everyone, as there are some schools and trusts doing quite a lot of sustainability and really pushing the boundaries but there’s a lot that haven’t started either. The only knowledge they have is what they have seen or read on the news, and they don’t have the relevant skills for transformational change in the sector. An example of this is the Department of Education strategy states that every school in the country should have a sustainability lead by 2025, however, no one has thought about what skills the sustainability lead require and the attributes and behaviours and if the lead doesn’t possess these skills how do you guide and mentor them. There is also the challenge that it is not mandatory, there is no rule to say that we have to decarbonise our schools, it’s a government strategy rather than a policy. So there is a challenge around the buy-in and getting people to realise that we all need to be part of the solution. We needed a course that had more than just the science of decarbonisation but instead the content around how you do it and how do you bring people along the journey and change aspects of your organisation based on what has changed for others. There are lots of challenges particularly early on and there are still challenges as we are quite early in the sustainability journey but now, we have knowledge and more importantly we have got some new networks and relationships that we are able to draw upon. That is a powerful tool to be able to accelerate our own journey in sustainability. 

Has the Sustainability Management course changed your perspective on business sustainability? 

The course has broadened my perspective on sustainability it has made us think more around some of the basics such as gas and energy and instead has made us think more about our supply chains, who are we buying from and what are we buying. Encouraging thinking on how we can re-wire some of the supply chains to ensure that we are buying sustainable goods and services and to drill in to what this might look like, so we can start to get an expectation around our suppliers of what we want them to be doing and we can start to ask the right questions of them. We did a piece of work over summer looking at the carbon footprints of our supply chains and they make up the majority of the carbon footprint in our schools and trusts. Its really important that we understand the business and also to be able to speak the language they are speaking and to use this in a positive way, for example we are starting to build partnerships with business and the private sector that we wouldn’t have had in the past and we have started to develop richer and better conversations and partnerships for the education sector because of it.  A lot of that comes down to the fact that you need the knowledge to ask questions and engage in conversations and that’s where the CISL course certainly helped. 

How has the course impacted your career?

To an extent it has transformed my career, my career is in education, but I previously worked in UK and International charities predominantly around finance and operations. How do we fund and run companies with a focus on providing support to them. When we started thinking about environmental sustainability it was more of a passion project due to interest so I opened the door and encouraged others to take a look at it and question how it can apply to our organisation. If I rolled us on now 3-4 years down the line, I would say the majority of my conversations now start with sustainability and the environment and then work their way back to what does that mean for finance and operations opposed to finance and operations being the first point of conversation. I could pick a few examples in finance where it used to be just about procurement, what we buy and whether it is good value. Now, we discuss whether we need to buy it, what are we buying, where are we buying from and the impact of what we are buying, who’s the supplier and how can I work with that supplier differently. All of these conversations happen through a sustainability lens and once we work out that’s the right thing and we definitely need it, then we are able to talk about finance and accounting. It has really flipped things completely from where it used to be to where it is now, quite transformational in a good way. 

Can you tell us of a project or initiate where you applied concepts from the course? 

We have primary schools and secondary schools and all schools have interactive whiteboards at the front of the class that the teachers use and the ones that we had were all coming up to the end of life and we knew that the impact of those on our carbon footprint is quite high as we found that with many of them they weren’t able to be automatically turned off, so they were frequently left on overnight. We knew that we had a big project and a large piece of investment so we started conversations with suppliers at the turn of 2024 to understand the products and suppliers that were out there and I think that the course certainly helped with those conversations because what we wanted to know was where does the supplier come from, where do the raw materials come from, who is making them and how they are being made, are they from the UK and are there elements of this supply chain that we should be worried about as a risk in terms of wider conversations such as modern slavery and precious metals and where they are sourced from along with how they are being shipped to the UK and then conversations about the efficiency of products overtime, as it will be a big capital investment, will this pay for itself in terms of energy efficiency, is the demand on electricity supply going to be lower, are they repairable and are there parts that can be changed and replaced, can it be upgraded overtime, can the life be extended and avoid having to replace things over and over again. Then we have conversations about what happens at the end of its life. I think the course helps us in thinking about needing to replace an interactive whiteboard to a far richer conversation because the course is quite evidence based it encourages away from just asking the questions and instead providing us with something that can be backed up with evidence. 

What advice would you give to anyone considering a CISL online course? 

Allocate enough time to it, I think has got to be my number one piece of advice. You could probably do the course quite superficially and try to scrape through it but I think that you would miss out on an awful lot of the richness of the course and that comes from online conversations with delegates on the course and comes from the group work but actually it comes from going away and doing the research in some of the areas that you might be studying. I found that some of it was not necessarily completely related to me and my organisation, although it was absolutely fascinating and I think that element of the joy of learning and getting back in to studying is gave me a more enjoyable experience and I got a lot more out of it. Some of the course is challenging such as writing essays in a style that you perhaps aren’t quite used to as you haven’t done it for a long time or maybe you haven’t done it before its different and takes a bit of getting used to, but once you are through that and in the rhythm of the course, I think just allocating enough time to it to make the most out of it because its not a course that is about passing or failing and its more about what you learn and what you can take away from it that you can then apply, because it all has real world consequences. It doesn’t have to be theoretical and most of the time what I learnt from it I am applying in one way or another within my organisation to make it better. 

Anything you would like to add? 

At the moment not every school and trust has the funding and capacity to do the CISL course or an equivalent course because I think the learning that you get from the course is longer, harder, broader and deeper than a 1-2 hour short course that you might do online. It is invaluable in considering what we need to do to make a difference and I can be a voice to try and share some of that knowledge but the way the course is designed, its basic building blocks, then building the foundations and then you’re adding more and building networks adding a lot of richness to the conversations, it isn’t an easy thing to share and I would encourage organisations to take on courses like this even though it’s a big investment of money and time, you absolutely get the returns from it and I shall certainly be speaking to the DfE about the training and support that is provided for sustainability leads as they require something that is the equivalent of the course, if not more.