Bridging gaps and driving Action in MATs through our Sustainable Schools assessment
Impact
▪ New Sustainability & Social Value Policy in development.
▪ Greater awareness among leadership & staff around sustainability.
▪ Path forward identified for compliance to DfE priorities.
Unlock sustainable growth for your Trust!
Challenges
With increasing requirements for schools to be sustainable outlined in the Department for Education’s (DfE) Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy, a Multi-Academy Trust needed to identify what gaps it had in its climate action strategy to make impact and action more targeted.
However, with not much support to fulfil the increased requirements, a structured approach to identifying current gaps and interventions was needed to draw out a clear way forward from the regulatory noise.
Solutions
Value Match used its Sustainable Schools service to help the trust establish a baseline of their sustainability governance and social value impact and maturity to map improvement opportunities across six categories of sustainability.
The output from the baseline work was a detailed Sustainable Schools Assessment report with insights and a roadmap to greater compliance to UK Government sustainability requirements in Multi-Academy Trusts, including the DfE’s Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy.
This report also provided a proposed plan which management could review and provide input for.
Outcomes
From this gap analysis:
• The trust’s current climate action plan was validated as being on track.
• Actionable insights were provided around:
- Increasing staff capacity through training on environmental protection and human rights.
- Addressing health & wellbeing issues among employees.
- Creating a process for driving sustainability quality standards in suppliers through procurements.
• The report has served as a tool in raising awareness across trust stakeholders, especially upper management, around what core areas of focus are for sustainable impact.
Off the back of this report, improvements are already underway with the development of a Sustainability and Social Value Policy and delivery of sustainable procurement with Value Match’s support.
Testimonials
Value Match’s Sustainable Schools Assessment helped us tremendously in identifying where we were on track and where our gaps were. This will help us with weaving sustainability into standard practice to ensure we protect people and the planet in all that we do.
