Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) empowers students with knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes to make informed decisions for environmental integrity, economic viability, and social justice. It is an interdisciplinary approach, often aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that promotes critical thinking, systemic, and responsible action to foster a sustainable future. (QAA, 2021)
ESD is focused on:
· Supporting students and staff to develop the knowledge, competencies and ability to pursue sustainable visions of the future, using systems thinking to understand the interrelationships.
· Supporting students and staff to appreciate the complexity of world, the ‘wicked problems’ (complex and uncertain) that continuously emerge, how to critical challenge and problem solve these, and how they can be personally and professional contribute to positive change.
· Challenging, supporting and enabling students and staff to co-design, collaborate and drive change for sustainable development.
The importance of ESD is reflected in the recent course specification changes, making sustainable development a more explicit inclusion in all courses across the Group, can you share your experience in our quick quiz:
Education for Sustainable Development in your teaching – Fill in form
Why ESD matters for students
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) helps students make sense of complex, real-world challenges by connecting environmental, social and economic perspectives. By engaging with ESD, students build the ability to think critically, develop systems thinking, and evaluate the consequences of decisions over time.
Employers increasingly expect graduates to demonstrate ethical awareness, responsible business practice, and confidence working with uncertainty and trade-offs. Environmental considerations including resource scarcity and climate change are critical in business strategy and require new ways of working and problem solving.
Students have stated this is something they do want to learn more about ESD and they think will be important in their careers:
81% of students agree or strongly agree that they would like to learn more about sustainable development, that this should be incorporated into courses and teaching, the university is taking action to limit its environmental and social impact and being a student at Coventry University encourages them to think and act to help the environment and other people and provides opportunities to get involved in taking action. (SOS-UK Sustainability Skills Survey, Coventry University, 2025)
Many approaches to this and core competencies
UNESCO identifies 8 core competencies to achieve sustainable development (specifically the UN Sustainable Development Goals), these include systems thinking, problem solving, self-awareness and critical thinking. These and the following examples might support teaching for sustainable development:
Examples of how students can gain ESD knowledge and skills include:
· Using sustainability-focused case studies and ‘wicked problem’ scenarios relevant to the discipline.
· Taking part in problem- or enquiry-based learning (investigating a sustainability question using evidence and structured evaluation).
· Completing authentic projects with real briefs (for example, policy, design, improvement or audit tasks linked to the SDGs).
· Learning through interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary collaboration with students from other subject areas and external partners.
· Engaging in co-created learning (students as partners), such as helping shape topics, resources, or assessment criteria.
· Exploring sustainability through storytelling (narratives, lived experience, digital stories) to build empathy and insight into complexity.
· Participating in debates, simulations and role play to practise decision-making, negotiation and managing trade-offs.
· Applying learning through campus as a living lab and place-based learning in the local community.
· Joining volunteering, and extra-curricular leaning e.g through Pheonix Plus programmes with sustainability-related objectives.
· Building capability via reflection (values, ethics and impact), supported by portfolios and peer learning.
Teaching guides and support
The following resources provide detailed materials to support colleagues in ESD:
QAA and Advance HE (2021) Education for Sustainable Development Guidance – UK sector guidance on definitions, curriculum design, teaching/learning/assessment approaches, and an annotated resources section.
UNESCO (2017) Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives – learning objectives and examples aligned to the SDGs, useful for designing outcomes and activities.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the 17 goals and targets provide a shared framework to contextualise discipline content and student projects.
Principles of for Responsible Management Education (PRME), arising from a business school context there a range of resources are available including the Blueprint for SDG Integration into Curriculum.
A short CUG introduction presentation is available here. CUG ESD intro session for domains site.pdf
CU-ESD working group: General | CU-ESD Working Group | Microsoft Teams