Time is running out to ensure a habitable planet for our children. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out principles and pathways but because governments aren’t yet doing enough, the Secretary-General has called for urgent, worldwide public action ‘to generate an unstoppable movement pushing for the required transformations’ (Guterres, António 2019). Schools have a moral duty to take a lead but many school leaders in England feel isolated, overburdened by systemic pressure for competitive performance, and torn between conflicting moral and professional priorities (Hammersley-Fletcher 2015; Variyan and Gobby 2022). Some, however, are overcoming these barriers by using the SDGs as a framework to reshape their core mission and curricula, motivating and enabling children to thrive in the present through addressing the threats to their future (Bourn and Hatley 2022). Other schools, led by passionate headteachers with a background in environmental activism, are bringing lasting transformation to their schools by reorienting and integrating priorities to make sustainability their baseline rather than an additional aim; this often requires the courage and experience to ‘game the sytem’ where national policy doesn’t sufficiently prioritise sustanability education (Dixon 2022). These exceptional schools cannot change wider policy and practice alone – but by connecting with others, and with strategic support, they could share powerful examples, generate hope and exert significant pressure on policy. Equally important is the need to support schools without exceptional, visionary leadership in CCSE. In this symposium paper, we will present our findings from interviews with 10 headteachers from English schools on their engagement with Climate Change and Sustainability Education (CCSE) (Higham, Kitson and Sharp, forthcoming), and report on our ongoing work with sustainability lead teachers in a network of 10 schools. We will illustrate the moral and professional tensions headteachers feel, and the forms of defensive compliance to which it drives them in justifying the sincere but limited and piecemeal approaches to CCSE in their schools. For example, will highlight the gap between their recognition of the need for cultural change and cross-curricular integration and the current distribution of CCSE into a few subject areas and initiatives. We will then outline how sustainability leads have so far collaborated, with our support, to build morale and share ideas and best practice in order to try to build leadership for change from below.

Bourn, Douglas, and Jenny Hatley. 2022. ‘Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals: Evidence in Schools in England’. Dixon, David. 2022. Leadership for Sustainability: Saving the Planet One School at a Time. Crown House Publishing Ltd. Guterres, António. 2019. ‘Remarks to High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development’. Presented at the UN SDG Summit, New York, NY, September. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2019-09-24/remarks-high-level-political-sustainable-development-forum. Hammersley-Fletcher, Linda. 2015. ‘Value(s)-Driven Decision-Making: The Ethics Work of English Headteachers within Discourses of Constraint’. Educational Management Administration & Leadership 43 (2): 198–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143213494887. Variyan, George, and Brad Gobby. 2022. ‘“The Least We Could Do”?: Troubling School Leaders’ Responses to the School Strikes for Climate in Australia’. Journal of Educational Administration and History, December, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2022.2153110.