NGO Sustainable Schools Forum Workshop: Communicating Sustainability - How to reach mainstream schools?

Posted: 17 October 2008

The workshop on ‘Communicating Sustainability – how to reach mainstream schools’, held in December 2008, was attended by NGOs working on Sustainable Schools, DCSF and a small number of invited school representatives and local authorities to provide the ground truthing.

Workshop Report: Communicating Sustainability - How to reach mainstream schools?

There were 45 delegates in attendance. The event was an interactive workshop and delegates were encouraged to bring with them examples or information about:

	their communications approaches/ campaigns including how language is used and which audiences are targeted; and
	their understanding of any work done with mainstream schools and what interested/ motivated them to contribute to the workshop discussion.

At the workshop SEEd shared results of two projects:

	identifying teachers needs – a review of surveys and research, and
	3 focus groups of mainstream on understanding how schools select a new initiative, what they know about SS and where they would look for support.

There were also presentations from Oxfam (on their recent research into Discourse Analysis and what the sector says about education and what the mainstream education discourse says), the C-Change Woodcraft Folk Project (and a Mainstreaming climate change youth project) and Generation Green (the British Gas award programme which has reached a quarter of UK schools through families and friends).