Sustainability Curriculum in UK University Sustainability Reports

Abstract

One of the major barriers to incorporating sustainability in the HE curriculum is its absence from the university's sustainability strategy, the annual reflection of which is the institution's sustainability report. While strategies stipulate future targets, reports record what has already been achieved in the previous academic year. In that respect, sustainability reports function as internally created reviews of an institution's sustainability activity. Various reviews of sustainability curriculum have taken place in the UK HE sector. This is the first effort to explore sustainability curriculum provision exclusively through HEIs' sustainability reports. The sample consists of the most recent, whole-institution sustainability reports issued by UK HEIs in the past five years. An exploratory content analysis identified the reports' sustainability curriculum coverage patterns. The findings suggest that UK universities are widely heterogeneous in their sustainability curriculum reporting practices. Of the universities that have issued a whole-institution sustainability report in the past five years, 37% cover their sustainability curriculum provision in a comprehensive way, in their reports. These findings might be of interest to sustainability professionals in the reporting or the curriculum provision end. The study hopes to encourage wider coverage of the sustainability curriculum provision in universities' wholeinstitution sustainability reports.

A computational approach to evaluating curricular alignment to the united nations sustainable development goals

“…The tools outlined above emphasize sustainability integration across four key functions, namely; education, research, community and operations. Therefore, universities that publish sustainability reports, typically include their sustainability curriculum as a central component (Kosta, 2018). For example, CSAF assesses curricular offerings based on the proportion of modules with some sustainability content and the number of students taking those modules.…”

Characteristics of UK higher education institutions that disclose sustainability reports

“…Rodríguez Bolívar et al (2013) investigated the online reporting of corporate social responsibility in 25 Anglo-American universities and concluded that universities pay little attention to the online disclosure of sustainability activities. Furthermore, there are some case studies (Dagilienė and Mykolaitienė, 2016;An et al, 2017;Kräusche and Pilz, 2018;Schoeps and Hemmer, 2018) and more comprehensive content analyses that analyse sustainability reports by using small international samples (Lozano, 2011;Romolini et al, 2015;Bice and Coates, 2016) or comparing more or less small samples of different countries such as Australia (Gamage and Sciulli, 2016; Schaffhauser-Linzatti and Ossmann, 2018), Austria (Lopatta and Jaeschke, 2014;Schaffhauser-Linzatti and Ossmann, 2018), Canada (Fonseca et al, 2011;Sassen and Azizi, 2018b), Germany (Lopatta and Jaeschke, 2014;Sassen et al, 2014), Italy (Siboni et al, 2013;Del Sordo et al, 2016), the UK (Kosta, 2018) and the USA (Sassen and Azizi, 2018a). All the investigations came to the unanimous conclusion that sustainability reporting at higher education institutions is still in its early stages, and the levels of disclosure of sustainability information are still rather low.…”

“…All the investigations came to the unanimous conclusion that sustainability reporting at higher education institutions is still in its early stages, and the levels of disclosure of sustainability information are still rather low. The UK study by Kosta (2018) has a specific focus and investigates the sustainability curriculum in UK university sustainability reports. Kosta (2018) found that 4 per cent of the UK higher education institutions report on their sustainability curriculum in a comprehensive manner.…”

“…The UK study by Kosta (2018) has a specific focus and investigates the sustainability curriculum in UK university sustainability reports. Kosta (2018) found that 4 per cent of the UK higher education institutions report on their sustainability curriculum in a comprehensive manner. Overall, the prior research focused on descriptive evidence on what higher education institutions disclosed in their sustainability report.…”

“…Although there is (normative) research on the relevance of sustainability reporting by higher education institutions (Adams, 2013), the integration of sustainability into higher education institutions (Ralph and Stubbs, 2014), assessment tools (Lozano and Young, 2013) or the internal reporting process (Ceulemans et al, 2015a), only a few empirical studies have examined their sustainability reports. These studies have primarily investigated small samples with an eye to the diffusion of sustainability reports (Alonso-Almeida et al, 2015), specific cases (Dagilienė and Mykolaitienė, 2016;An et al, 2017;Kräusche and Pilz, 2018) and their content (Lozano, 2011;Siboni et al, 2013;Fonseca et al, 2011;Lopatta and Jaeschke, 2014;Sassen et al, 2014;Romolini et al, 2015;Bice and Coates, 2016;Del Sordo et al, 2016;Gamage and Sciulli, 2016;Kosta, 2018;Azizi, 2018a, 2018b;Schaffhauser-Linzatti and Ossmann, 2018). These studies have largely provided descriptive evidence of the contents of the sustainability reports published by a selection of higher education institutions, whereas research on the potential determinants of disclosure is still lacking.…”