Leadership for Sustainability

Dr David Dixon was a full-time primary teacher for 15 years before becoming a head teacher for the following two decades. In that time, he promoted the twin causes of environmental education and sustainability, which formed the central ethos of his schools. David is now a freelance education consultant, specialising in curriculum and leadership and helping individual schools to link sustainability with school improvement more generally.

It is clear that students are concerned about a future, their future, in a world of altered climate and constrained resources. Survey after survey tells us this and yet we move glacially, if at all, towards solutions that might give them confidence. As educators, our priority is to make the abstract, distant and global into something that is real, now and local. If we are making learning visible, we need to make sustainability visible. This is what David Dixon has done in writing Leadership for Sustainability. He has given schools a way forward - a method of taking control at a local level and delivering, for students and their community, a practical way of making a difference. He also realises that the best protagonists are created in primary schools. (I've seen first-hand how effective smaller environmentalists can be!) Yes, we need systemic change, but we also need to get everyone on board to support such measures. The best way is to start at home - and this book is an excellent place to begin that journey.Dr Paul S. Ganderton