Heart of Worcestershire College: Teaching Sustainability to the Teachers

Sustainability sits in an awkward place within UK Further Education teacher training. It is listed in the Level 4 Certificate in Education and Training as part of the ‘minimum core’ — alongside maths, English, and digital skills — but there is no dedicated unit, no clear methodology, and no expectation that teachers will do more than demonstrate an awareness of it. For teacher educators working with practising vocational staff — electricians, chefs, hairdressers, plumbers, paramedics — the gap is acute. These are professionals who teach in settings with limited time and resources, and whose students will graduate directly into small businesses where there will likely be no environmental officer and no sustainability strategy.

Standard sustainability programmes — designed for corporate or academic audiences — rarely land well in this context. They often ask learners to start from a position of prior engagement with sustainability. FE vocational teachers and their students often arrive without that starting point. What they have instead is practical intelligence, vocational expertise, and a genuine willingness to engage when an approach meets them where they are. The challenge was to find something that would do this.

Jenny Willis is a teacher educator and quality improvement lead at Heart of Worcestershire College in the West Midlands. Her Level 4 teacher training cohort reflects the breadth of vocational FE: plumbers, electricians, hairdressers, chefs, performing arts teachers, construction workers, and those working with young people on entry-level programmes. Many hold deep vocational expertise with little formal academic background. Her role is to help them become confident, effective teachers — navigating the shift from expert practitioner to skilled educator. Sustainability education had always felt like something she was assembling herself, without the right framework to build it around.

When Jenny first encountered the RoundView, she saw something she had not found in other sustainability programmes: a framework that could be used by non-experts, that made itself relevant within whatever vocational context it was taken into, and that modelled the kind of active, social, inquiry-based learning she was working to develop in her trainee teachers.

She embedded the RoundView into her Level 4 sessions not as a sustainability add-on but as an integral part of pedagogy practice — using the ideas and the hands-on physical puzzles to do two things simultaneously: introduce sustainability thinking, and demonstrate what effective, hands-on learning looks like in practice. With a cohort of five paramedic trainers, the session became explicitly meta-pedagogical. After working through the RoundView jigsaws together, the group reflected on why the learning was designed the way it was — physical, social, colourful, inquiry-led rather than instructed — and used those observations to think about how they could bring the same principles into their own teaching. They concluded, unprompted, that RoundView exemplified a social constructivist approach.

With a larger cohort of twenty trainee teachers drawn from across vocational disciplines, she ran a full session using RoundView’s puzzle-based tools, drawing on the diversity of people in the room to surface how the same systemic thinking applies across completely different working contexts — from construction sites, to kitchen workshops, to performing arts studios.

Jenny has also begun framing sustainability education in FE as a safeguarding and prevent issue: young people without a positive sense of agency around environmental questions are more vulnerable to disengagement, nihilism, and — in some cases — radicalisation toward negative forms of activism. Framed this way, sustainability education moves from a curriculum preference to an institutional responsibility that senior leaders are already obligated to take seriously.

Powerful downstream evidence has come from a chef lecturer trainee. Following the RoundView session, Jack got his Level 2 hospitality and catering students to plan and run a sustainability-themed restaurant evening — a fully vegan, seasonal menu, with careful attention to the environmental impact of every ingredient and method. The students explained their choices to diners as they served them. The food, by all accounts, was excellent.

During a staff development day, Jenny ran a brief RoundView engagement at a stall for walk-by colleagues. The Deputy Principal and two Vice Principals stopped, engaged in just a few minutes, and immediately began identifying college-wide sustainability applications. Notably, the Deputy Principal asked how the same approach could be recreated for teaching other subjects — a recognition not only of the sustainability content, but of the pedagogical method itself.

Across her cohort, trainee teachers reported greater clarity about how to bring sustainability thinking into their vocational teaching without needing to become experts first. RoundView gave them a starting point that felt manageable and relevant, rather than imported from a world of corporate environmental reporting or academic theory.

In early 2026, Jenny was asked to run a sustainability session at the Education and Training Foundation’s annual Teaching and Learning Conference in Leeds — bringing RoundView to thirty FE providers from across England. One participant commented that at the start of the workshop, she could not think of how they were incorporating sustainability into their learning, but after one hour of learning and discussing RoundView, she had several positive ideas to take forward.

Jenny is continuing to develop RoundView-informed sessions for her teacher training programme, building out session plans using the RoundView workshop planning tool so that her trainee teachers can design and run their own sessions with their students.

RoundView gives non-specialist teachers a framework they can use confidently, without needing to become sustainability experts first. The potential for wider replication across the FE sector is significant: each trained teacher is a multiplier, reaching cohorts of vocational learners who will carry those habits of thought directly into the workplaces — often small, local businesses — where much of the population spends its working life.