A Rounder Sense of Purpose (RSP) is a three-year project developing an accredited framework of competences that has been tested through bespoke educator training programmes in six countries. This work draws on the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe framework of educator competences for ESD (UNECE 2012), which itself made reference to the work of the CSCT-project (Sleurs 2008). The UNECE framework remains a largely theoretical tool that does not link the ‘competences’ to assessable learning outcomes. During 2016 RSP partners worked on distilling the UNECE competences, which included reducing the number, removing repetition and identifying gaps. This was done with reference to other work in the field including that of Wiek et al. (2011). In 2017 project partners are developing and delivering training programmes to approximately 400 pre-service and in-service educators as well as conducting mixed methods research into the impact of engagement with this competence framework. A key issue for project partners is the development of assessment tools and techniques that align with the pedagogical approaches being promoted by the competence training programmes. Our contribution to this symposium will include a presentation of these outputs and a discussion of the early findings of our research.

Prøitz, T.S. (2015) Learning outcomes as a key concept in policy documents throughout policy changes, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 59: 3, pp. 275-296. Sleurs, W (ed.) (2008) Competencies for ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) teachers. A framework to integrate ESD in the curriculum of teacher training institutes, Brussels Online at: http://platform.ue4sd.eu/downloads/CSCT_Handbook_11_01_08.pdf Wiek, Arnim, Lauren Withycombe, and Charles L. Redman. 2011. Key Competencies in Sustainability: A Reference Framework for Academic Program Development. Sustainability Science 6(2): 203–18.