Katerina Kosta

One of the major barriers to incorporating sustainability in the HE curriculum is its absence from the university sustainability strategy, the annual reflection of which is the annual sustainability report. While strategies specify targets, reports record what has already been achieved. In that respect, reports function as internally created reviews of universities’ sustainability activity. Various reviews of sustainability teaching activity have taken place in the UK HE sector. The current study attempts to explore formal sustainability teaching provision exclusively through HEIs’ annual sustainability reports. The sample consists of the most recent, whole-institution sustainability reports issued by UK HEIs from 2016 to 2018. An exploratory content analysis identifies sustainability curriculum coverage patterns, using a coding frame based on the STARS framework. Findings suggest that of the 167 UK HEIs 4% report on their sustainability curriculum provision comprehensively. The findings might be of interest to sustainability professionals in the reporting or the curriculum provision end. The study hopes to encourage wider coverage of sustainability curriculum provision in HE sustainability reports.

Sustainability policies are an important tool for mainstreaming Sustainability in Higher Education (SHE) as they entail management level commitments. In 2013, following government request, all UK universities have an (environmental) sustainability policy publicly available on their website, which normally includes provision for education, research, estates and engagement. Given their recent existence, few studies to date have explored the nature and content of these documents while even less have focused on how sustainability research is conceptualised in the policies. The present paper aims to address this gap through an exploration of UK universities’ sustainability policies and their conceptualization of sustainability research. References to research are compared with references to teaching, estates and engagement in order to explore the tendency identified by previous literature of the estates dominating the SHE discourse. The sample used consists of the sustainability policies of the thirty ‘greenest’ universities in the UK, according to the People and Planet University League 2015. The method used is content analysis assisted by QSR NVivo 10 software (QSR International Pty Ltd). The findings indicate that estates and operations are the most popular themes in the policies, with research occupying a secondary position. References to research mostly focus on the creation of new sustainability research centres and the generation of impact and funding. Regional government legislation is seen as affecting the content of sustainability policies as regions with ESD implementation legislation enjoy higher sustainability uptake in their universities. UK higher education institutions may find a comparative analysis of sustainability policies useful as these documents constitute part of their CSR profile and they are now widely scrutinized by sustainability assessment organisations and other interested parties.

Purpose. Research on student views of sustainability issues abounds in the literature. Student responses to university sustainability however, as a phenomenon taking place within the time and space of higher education, seem to be under-researched. This study explores how university sustainability is perceived by postgraduate students of the Educational Research and Sustainable Development programmes at the University of Exeter. The aim is to explore whether programme of study influences student response to university sustainability. Design/Methodology/Approach: An on-line questionnaire containing Likert type items was administered to the students of the two programmes. As university sustainability is a still evolving concept which lacks a well-established definition, the content of the questionnaire items was based on descriptions of university sustainability by major higher education stakeholders. Replies were coded and the resulting data were analysed statistically to explore the differences between the two groups. Findings. Programme of study is seen to influence sustainability knowledge, with sustainable development students scoring significantly higher in the knowledge scale than educational research students. The findings indicate a positive correlation between knowledge of and attitudes towards sustainability. The results compare favourably with findings of previous research, which supports infusion of sustainability content across the curriculum as a means of improving graduate sustainability literacy. Research Limitations. Exploring how programme of study impacts students' sustainability attitudes needs to be further researched as correlation does not necessarily indicate causality and factors other than academic experience might have influenced student performance. The convenience sample used for data collection and the relatively low response rate do not allow transferability or generalizability of the results. Practical Implications: As student voice is gradually becoming a crucial component for universities' development with the increase of tuition fees, the demand for a comprehensive understanding of student sustainability needs emerges. The study attempts to address this necessity through an investigation of postgraduate views on university sustainability. Moreover, a suggestion put forward by this paper is that assessment of the impact sustainability initiatives have on student experience might be more efficient if audits focus on university rather than universal sustainability issues. Originality/Value. The present study employs for the first time the term 'university sustainability' to denote sustainability practices taking place within the time and space of higher education. While past research has examined mainly undergraduates' opinions of sustainability, this study focuses exclusively on postgraduates as they have greater experience of higher education settings. Finally, by examining both attitudes and knowledge a holistic exploration of student response is attempted with the majority of the previous research focusing on either attitudes or knowledge.