Colleges Green Week: Sustainability youth social action project at Nottingham College

This blog was written by Danny Rawling, Foundation Learning Lecturer, Nottingham College as part of Colleges Green Week, which celebrates the incredible work colleges are doing to tackle sustainability and climate change.

In January 2025, as the world experienced its hottest January on record and temperatures were 1.75°C above the 1850-1900 average, Nottingham College launched the Sustainable Futures Project. This initiative empowers all students from entry to Higher Education (HE) to pitch for up to £4,000 in funding to develop real sustainability solutions.

This is not a classroom exercise. This is education as it should be, a model where sustainability and challenge-based learning (CBL) work together to equip students with the skills they actually need.

Students have been set a clear challenge: "How can you create behavioural change to make a more liveable and sustainable future for Nottingham and wider communities?" They must develop innovative solutions while meeting the requirements of at least one UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). To do this they complete a budget, an entry form, and potentially two judging panels where their work will be scrutinised by local experts, politicians, and business leaders.

To ensure accessibility, the project provides students with guiding questions, external contacts, and localised information. Faculty tutors, maths and English staff, and personal development tutors have been encouraged to embed the project within their teaching thus ensuring sustainability isn’t an add-on, but an integrated part of learning.

This is not the first time students have taken on this challenge. Last year, in a pilot with Level 3 business students, the winning group built a 10ft structure filled with plastic collected from the college to highlight plastic waste. The project was shown to roughly 4,000 students in their first week of term and 650 staff on career professional development (CPD) day. It led to real institutional change, influencing the catering department to significantly reduce plastic use and inspiring us to expand this model of learning.

A 2021 report by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) found that 68% of staff in post-16 education felt the system does not adequately educate learners on sustainability issues. Even more concerning, 74% of teaching staff said they lacked the training to embed sustainability into their work. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, it must be woven into the fabric of education, not treated as an afterthought.

Challenge-based learning does exactly that. It forces students to engage with sustainability as a practical, problem-solving discipline, not just an abstract concept. To pitch effectively, students must integrate maths when balancing budgets, English when drafting application forms and oral skills to present persuasive arguments. They learn by doing, failing, refining, and succeeding. This is the process of real-world innovation. These are the demands of the green skills economy that will help meet national and international targets around sustainability.

It also develops something far more powerful than knowledge - ownership. When students realise they are not just completing a task for a grade, but instead working towards something real, a shift happens. Confidence grows. Resilience develops. They stop asking, "Is this on the exam?" and start asking, "How do we make this work?"

The ETF report made it clear: while sustainability is widely recognised as important, its integration across institutions is inconsistent. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. If models like challenge-based learning are proving effective, the question is no longer "should we embed them?" but "why haven’t we already?"

Because now, the blueprint exists. The results are happening, and once the potential of real sustainability education is recognised, it becomes impossible to justify a return to passive learning.

Education is at a turning point. The question is no longer "Can students handle real responsibility?"—they already are. The question is "How quickly will education evolve to reflect this reality?"

The climate crisis will not wait for education to catch up. It’s time to move beyond discussion. The time for passive learning is over. Now, we act.

National Green Week (17–21 March) celebrates the incredible work colleges are doing to tackle sustainability and climate change.

Launched by the Association of Colleges, the week unites the sector with industry partners and government agencies to showcase how colleges are driving sustainability forward.