Developing the sustainable school: thinking the issues through

This paper reports on a study that was a response to a call from the UK government%s Department of Children, Schools and Families for research into the link between the work of schools that address sustainability and the UK%s national sustainable development indicators. This was part of the government%s sustainable schools initiative, developed as a contribution to the UN%s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. The paper uses the four capitals model of Herman Daly and Donella Meadows to critically examine, firstly, how a school might make such a contribution to sustainable development, and, then, how we might come to know how effectively this is progressing. In doing this, the paper builds on Webster%s work about the stages that a sustainable school might go through in its development, and the result is three sets of process descriptors to guide a school%s thinking about what it might do. These are presented in the sense of an embryonic and sketchy map to the terrain, rather than as a set of instructions or a detailed plan to follow.