Organisational strategies for implementing education for sustainable development in the UK primary schools: a service innovation perspective

Education for sustainable development (ESD) in schools requires a whole-school approach to ensure that all stakeholders, including students, value sustainability and express this value in an active engagement in the ongoing development process. Such inclusivity however is rarely achieved, with benefits of ESD in schools usually recognised only by a select few. School strategies that continue to dominate research focus on management of the finite resources or give emphasis to a particular pedagogical agenda, whereas approaches that emphasise whole-school ESD engagement are scarce. This paper aims to address this gap. To do so, we propose to frame schools as service organisations and use service logic approach and service innovation theory to review how five primary schools in England define and implement ESD. The findings from our comparative case study discuss three strategies that schools as service organisations need to consider: defining sustainable student experience as a core service concept, developing an organisational culture of sustainability-driven innovation, and engaging in a value co-creation process with external stakeholders in order to facilitate the concept. Our results suggest that by placing “sustainable student experience” as the core service concept, schools can align their external and internal organisational activities to enable sustainable education for all stakeholders.