Why changemaking in FE is key to securing green future

By Lou Mycroft, Co-founder of #JoyFE and a Green Changemaker

It’s been nearly a year since the Green Changemakers project began. Initially funded by the West Midlands and Warwickshire Combined Authority and hosted by Fircroft College of Adult Education, the project trained 40 staff from FE and skills in the knowledge and practice of changemaking for a just and sustainable future.

It was a bit of a shift for professional learning. Conventionally, we’d think about teaching ‘green skills’, but this is too generic as every profession, trade and vocation has its own palette of green skills. A fundamental design principle of the Green Changemakers programme was that, given the right conditions of respect, autonomy, time to think and innovate, up-to-date awarding bodies, access to information, accommodating systems and trust, most teachers would rise to the challenge of developing their own subject-specific pedagogy to meet the green agenda, without needing to be spoon fed.

Those conditions were extensive, and the programme supported people to use their changemaking skills, energy and influence to accelerate and scale up change. We used the expansive definition of ‘green skills’ based on AimHiEarth’s research and encouraged the changemakers to inspire and influence others in their organisations to do the same.

The conceptual heart of the programme was potentia, a joyful, changemaking power. This concept is based on the long-ago work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza who, writing in Latin, had two words for power at his disposal.

Potestas is what we think of, when we think of power. Status, hierarchy and clout, often invested in individuals and operationalised by the systems, structure and processes of the organization.

Potentia is a definition of power that has been lost to us down the centuries. Spinoza defined it as the desire humans (and non-humans) have to thrive and survive. It’s that energy you feel, when you are with others who inspire you, when the work of changemaking gives you a buzz. We all know those people and how we feel when they are in the room.

We need both, but in colleges today the latter is lacking and personal potentia is locked inside many staff who may not feel their energy and ideas are appreciated. But through the programme, the Green Changemakers practiced potentia in very practical ways. They may or may not have had ‘clout’ due to their position in the hierarchy, but they learned to develop their influence with people who do and inspire the potentia of colleagues and students alike.

Not all Green Changemakers were teachers; the project also worked with technicians, estates managers, learning supporters, gardeners and others who contribute to the social and educational fabric of FE and skills. Inevitably, and beautifully, the group took green changemaking principles into their pedagogies, most notably in the ways in which they connected themselves and students into nature, from field trips to a simple, regular, noticing of the weather, and the learning opportunities that this expansion offers.

Since the start of the programme, we’ve seen the work of Green Changemakers ripple out. They’ve driven the momentum of sustainable change forward, joining up siloed pockets of great practice and enabled others to discover their appetite for change. They did this through fresh approaches to meetings and communication, co-creation and planning, and the design of frameworks for longer term impact. Green Changemakers took over staff development activities, created energy around new initiatives, addressed systems glitches for smoother operations and gathered ideas from colleagues and students who may have believed themselves unheard. Whilst personal development was strong (evidenced by job role changes, as well as self-perceived confidence and skills development), what matters most was the way colleges were transforming in joined-up ways, as staff at all levels and in all areas of college woke up to the belief that change is possible.

The funded project finished in March 2024 but the work has carried on. Having established a community of practice on WhatsApp, we continued to energise and support one another. We’ve run staff events, written a book chapter, recorded a podcast, inspired new job roles, been nominated for awards, extended green skills networks on social media and made affirmative contributions to shifting cultures and operations, by helping to focus change around nature, people and systems, thus expanding the narrow FE focus of technical green skills. We are co-designing a virtual Green Skills Hub, to be launched in March 2025 as another way of reaching out into the FE and skills community.

We have continued researching the impact of Green Changemaking, long after we returned our final monitoring form, which was concerned only with short-term impact like how many people were trained, how many colleges were reached. If we are going to protect and serve the environment in the long term, we have got to go beyond short-term thinking, short-term funding and short-term metrics. We need to plan for what the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation calls the “Long Now”, recognising that the moment we’re in is shaped by the past and contains the seeds of the future. How can we learn forward into greener and more sustainable practices? We don’t know the answer, but if we are to imagine a different future, if we are to move our impact mindset from prove to improve, then we need different stories.

Since the end of the pilot funding six months ago, without anyone asking us to do this, we have transformed our communications into a live data set. We harvest our WhatsApp messages to gather evidence of impact and as we continue that practice, we’ll move from the short to the medium and longer term. We come together in research circles online and have regular meetups at Fircroft College. We’re developing new region-wide and organisational Green Changemaker programmes and training events: this month, for example, we’re workshopping a new training day around ‘Long Now’ impact measurement, based on the Griffith Centre research, which will be available to the sector soon.

It has been a mind shift and could be a paradigm-shift if we can scale Green Changemakers across England and beyond. We know that every college has people in different roles and at all levels of the hierarchy who are passionate about environmental sustainability and who have the energy to do something about it, locked up inside of them. We hope you’ll join your stories with ours in a movement which could put FE and skills where it belongs, at the absolute forefront of transitioning to a greener, more just future.

The views expressed in Think Further publications do not necessarily reflect those of AoC or NCFE.