Learning sustainability

Learning for a Sustainable Future

Making an impact for generations to come

Sustainability in education

While we can make huge strides in sustainability across our estates and our business operations, we have a much greater impact to make as an educator.

By equipping our staff and students with the right knowledge and skills, we can make a lasting contribution toward a socially just and environmentally sustainable future. We can do this through a number of means – and believe that this happens through the whole university experience including our formal educational offering and our research, professional development programmes and through our informal offering such as our campus environment and facilities, and extra-curricular activities. 

The education we provide ensures that our students, those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, have the knowledge, skills and values needed to find solutions for sustainable development. For Manchester Met, this means incorporating education for sustainable development in all our programmes and relevant and current sustainable development issues as an integral part of our co-curricular offer
Professor Andy Dainty
Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education
The education we provide ensures that our students, those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, have the knowledge, skills and values needed to find solutions for sustainable development. For Manchester Met, this means incorporating education for sustainable development in all our programmes and relevant and current sustainable development issues as an integral part of our co-curricular offer
Professor Andy Dainty
Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education

  • Sustainability perceptions

    We have been asking our staff and students about their perceptions of sustainability, which help us gauge how we are embedding sustainability across our campus, practices, education and research activities. It helps us establish where we are improving year-on-year, and where we need to focus our efforts to improve our sustainability performance.  

    We ask all of our students as part of the enrolment survey and our staff through a biennial travel and sustainability survey about sustainability at the University. Our most recent Sustainability Perceptions report (March 2024) outlines our key findings and a previous sustainability perceptions report is available which present our findings prior and up until 2020. 

  • Education for sustainable development

    Embedding education for sustainable development

    We work to progress the ways in which we embed sustainability and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into our formal educational and professional development offering through a number of means. 

    The University’s Responsible Futures group leads and provides a mechanism for embedding education for sustainable development (ESD) into the formal and informal curriculum. The group is led by Professor Liz Price, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor Sustainability and strategic lead for ESD, and reports directly to the University’s Environment Strategy Group, chaired by our Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor.

    Our University Teaching Academy works to ensure we provide the necessary professional development opportunities and resources to embed ESD in our curriculum, while the Education Strategy principles offer guidance on how to do this. 

    The University Teaching Academy offers:

    Monitoring our progress

    The University’s Responsible Futures strategic lead Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Sustainability Professor Liz Price ensures that a key function of the project’s framework is to review and report our progress towards embedding ESD in our educational offering. 

    There are a number of mechanisms that the University uses to measure the integration of ESD:

    • Annual enrolment survey for all students – we ask all returning students whether they perceive that as a result of their University experience, they are gaining the skills and knowledge that are helping them understand key sustainable development issues. Information about this is available in our ‘students, staff and sustainability’ perceptions report.
    • Biennial staff travel and sustainability survey where we ask academic University employees to indicate whether they include sustainability in their teaching and research. Information about this is available in our students, staff and sustainability perceptions report. 
    • Our Responsible Futures working group and biennial audit report outlines the progress we have made towards embedding ESD and the steps we need to take to progress its integration.

    Our University Strategy and our Leadership in Sustainability Enabling Strategy set out the steps that must be taken to embed ESD, such as including the framing of ESD within the curriculum in course validation, review and quality assurance and enhancement processes, embedding ESD and meaningful education around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals across the formal and informal curriculum, and measuring impacts of ESD in relation to positive outcomes for students.

  • Responsible Futures Group

    The Responsible Futures Group lead a range of activities to embed sustainability and social responsibility into formal and informal learning across the University and the Union and is responsible for maintaining and improving our Responsible Futures Accreditation.  

    Manchester Metropolitan University and the Union are committed to working in an equal and active partnership to maintain and progress our SOS-UK Responsible Futures Accreditation, see our joint statement of intent. 

    The Responsible Futures working group is led by Professor Liz Price, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Sustainability and its membership consists of staff from the University and the Students’ Union working in partnership, and current Manchester Met student representatives.

    Read the latest Responsible Futures feedback report.

  • Professional development for sustainability

    Carbon literacy

    There are many opportunities for our staff to develop knowledge and skills for sustainable development – any member of staff can participate in our award-winning Carbon Literacy or Carbon Literacy Leaders training to receive official certification, and for those who wish to develop their skills further, we run Carbon Literacy train-the-trainer programmes - available to all staff and students.

    Embedding sustainability and ESD in the curriculum

    Academic members of staff can undertake our Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) course – which introduces the concept of embedding sustainability in Higher Education curricula, which is part of our ESD offering from the University Teaching Academy (UTA). Our Carbon Literacy offering has also been tailored for our academic communities so that they can embed Carbon Literacy learning into academic units and programmes.

    Staff engagement programme

    Our Sustainability Advocate Network provides an opportunity for staff to engage in sustainability at work. The Sustainability Advocate Network will launch in 2023-24, and will be a platform for raising awareness, sharing knowledge and collaborating with colleagues, as well as developing skills and knowledge through our professional development offering to progress sustainability across the University Space for ESD Collaboration.

    The University hosts the UK Consortium on Sustainability Research (UK-CSR), which provides a space for dialogue, collaboration and participation around ESD.

  • School, faculty or research team projects

    The University supports and highlights school, faculty or research team projects for sustainable development.

    The UN Sustainable Development Goals mapping project highlights this collaboration with research projects mapped against their related SDGs.

Engaging our students in real-world projects

Our students have the chance to work directly with Manchester Met faculties, departments and staff including the Estates, Facilities and Capital Development Directorate on sustainability-related placements, projects and research - these often create value for the students (in that our students’ attributes and skills for sustainability are enhanced) and for the University (in that the students working on our projects are contributing directly to improving our sustainability performance).

We are engaged in the NUS For Good offering to give students opportunities to gain experience and knowledge of working in a variety of sectors to develop important employability skills and competencies. Bespoke research, projects and placements ensure organisations benefit from capacity building, bright ideas and creative solutions for progressing sustainability challenges.

  • Biodiversity Management Plan GIS Project

    Natalia Gryskowska, a student on the MSc Environmental Practice, started a three-month project in June 2023 working alongside the University’s Sustainability Team and Facilities Management Teams. The project is Natalia’s placement, which is a requirement of her master’s course, and supervised by the Department of Natural Sciences. The project is designed to support the development of a biodiversity management plan for the university campus. The project involves undertaking a land cover survey on and urban green factor assessment of the green spaces on campus, interviewing key stakeholders, and developing a comprehensive GIS database indicating the various habitats on campus and plans for enhancing biodiversity. The project outputs will help consolidate previous and existing biodiversity management actions and inform our continuous improvement. The management plan will provide the key information required for the university grounds team and other stakeholders to conserve, restore, and enhance biodiversity value across our campus.

  • Landscape architecture – unit project

     The Sustainability Team and academic Dr Kosta Tzoulas (the University’s strategic lead for biodiversity) collaborated with the Landscape Architecture department in early 2022 to develop a student project as part of a landscape architecture unit to introduce students to construction and planting design in landscape architecture.  

    The project was shaped around redesigning areas of landscape at the University’s Birley site – which included the sensory herb garden area and the wetland area. A group of students was set the challenge to redesign the planting scheme in the herb garden area, to align with the University’s commitment to enhance biodiversity across its estate and to examine how the areas could be more inclusive and accessible.

    The unit was split into three main stages – site design, planting design, and construction design – the students were introduced to the herb garden and wetland areas by the sustainability team, and received a session from Dr Kosta Tzoulas about planting for biodiversity, sustainable urban drainage and as pollution filters.

    The students produced a portfolio of technical drawings and supporting documentation, reflecting the different workshops and stages of the unit, and presented their ideas to work as part of the assessment process, and for consideration by the Sustainability Team with a view to developing the herb garden and wetland areas.

  • Scope 3 carbon emissions project – masters thesis

    We are currently developing our approach to managing scope 3 carbon emissions, and over the course of 2022, are developing a scope 3 carbon management plan.

    As part of the project, we commissioned a masters student, Olivia Downham, from the Department of Natural Sciences to undertake research that supports the development of a standard of best practice for managing scope 3 emissions in the higher education sector, linked to their Master’s degree.

    Through desk-based research methods, the project aims to identify the higher education sector’s best practice for scope 3 carbon management, and to inform the University about best practice standards and frameworks in science-based carbon target setting. In addition, the project aims to develop options and recommendations for methods of best practice for scope 3 carbon management for Manchester Met to consider.

  • Perceptions of sustainability

    A student undertaking a BSc Criminology with quantitative methods degree undertook a project for her final year thesis with the University’s Sustainability team in 2021. The project aimed to analyse the student enrolment data from the academic year 2019/20. It came about as a result of the Q-step initiative, which aims to engage social-sciences subjects in quantitative research skills acquisition.

    Manchester Met asks its students as part of its annual online enrolment process a series of questions related to sustainability to gauge student perception and university progress towards embedding sustainability. Beth’s project was an exploration into ‘perceptions of sustainability based on cohorts’ by analysing the enrolment data from the academic year 2019/20. Across the year, Beth was supported by the Sustainability Team to develop her methodology and thesis, and provided a comprehensive analysis of our enrolment data, which has been used to inform our report about Students, Staff and Sustainability at Manchester Met.   

  • SHAPE sustainability impact project

    In 2021, our arts, humanities and business students recently worked on the SHAPE Sustainability Impact Project in partnership with the SOS-UK, The British Academy and our academics and professional staff.

    This was part of a wider project across the education sector to collaborate on engaging SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and the Economy/Environment) disciplines with addressing key sustainability challenges. 

    Manchester Met students formed three groups working on real-world projects determined by the University:

    • to engage students in the development of the University’s 2030 Sustainability Strategy
    • to determine the role that arts play in communicating and understanding sustainability
    • to develop strategies for organisations to contribute to zero carbon 2038

  • Student ambassadors for sustainability

    We actively promote and provide real-world paid opportunities for students to deliver a wide range of sustainability-related activities.

    Since 2015, students have been recruited to be ambassadors for sustainability, working through the University’s Jobs 4 Students scheme. We had over 30 students working directly for the sustainability and carbon literacy teams in previous years to support the delivery of our programmes. Current students can find out more and sign up.

    Sustainability ambassadors and MetMUnch students have helped create our 2030 Sustainability Strategy Communications to engage our communities in telling us what should be integral to our strategy, whilst our carbon literacy facilitators deliver training to their peers across the University through a cascading model called Carbon Literacy for Staff and Students.