Importance of School Environment in Light of Sustainable Development Goals

Despite increasing focus on school environment research globally, the research in India hasn’t received widespread attention. The paper is an attempt to draw focus on importance of school environment by understanding it in the light of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGs assume critical importance and will play a massive role in achieving quality education globally. They set clear goals for all the stakeholders, includers researchers, so as to see all are headed in a shared direction. The paper discusses the role of school environment in achieving Goal 4,5, and 10. Further, school environment research is reviewed and gaps are identified. The paper elicits current progress of India with respect to educational goals and proposes implications for improvement of the same.

Three years back, United Nations General Assembly in September 2015 adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These included a new set of goals, set collectively, which we identify as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, Agenda 2030 serves as the broad framework, and along with 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and the 169 targets under these goals, they form the overarching framework for global cooperation. The idea of sustainable development was established in the 1987 with the establishment of Brundtland Commission. They defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present generation without making a deal with the ability of subsequent generations to do the same.

Sustainable development goals (SDG), 2015-2030, span an incredibly diverse range of areas mainly categorized into 3 dimensions -economic, social, and environmental objectives. These 3 dimensions are further prorated into 17 goals like- poverty and hunger eradication, good health and well-being, affordable and clean energy, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, climate action, peace and justice among others, with education being one of them. These focus on development for the period 2015 to 2030. Education is concerned with SDG goal 4. SDG targets to be achieved under Goal 4 lists down- building educational facilities and specifically learning environments that are effective, inclusive, non-violent, and safe. It advocates that these facilities be child, disability, and gender sensitive.

School Environment

There is a colossal variation in definitions and sub-dimensions of school. There is also a great degree of confusion and going back and forth on use of terminologies to address school environment- a few being school climate, school culture, school ecology. This issue has been raised by many researchers (Houtte, 2005). Attempts to address the confusion, however, are more prevalent in the organizational psychology domain, of which school climate is a product of, as compared to the educational domain. But nonetheless, such attempts have been useful in providing some clarity to the great confusion (Denison, 1996; Schneider, Ehrhart., Macey, 2013). However, if looked at from a bird’s eye perspective, the essence of all these carries the same thought. They all talk about improving overall school life experiences that a child is likely to encounter that may as a result shape his/her development and outcomes. School climate is seen as the quality and character of school life (NSCC, 2007).

The importance of school climate research is exponentially growing from the last three decades. Early attempts at conceptualization of school climate made use of Halphin and Croft model (1963), Moos’s framework (1974), and Taguiri’s system to understand school climate (Anderson, 1982). With the growing body of research, the conceptualization has become an arduous task, however these names remain the pioneer in studying school climate. School climate effect corresponds to all-round phases of development of a child- be it physical, cognitive, emotional, moral, or social. School environment is researched from a multitude of perspectives like academic outcomes, mental health and well-being, and safety among others. Thapa, Cohen, Guffey, and Alessandro (2013) infact identify five dimensions that school climate is essentially viewed from. These are- safety, relationships, teaching and learning, institutional environment, and the school improvement process. Under this umbrella of dimensions falls a range of specific outcome variables, namely- academic achievement, equality, sensitization, attitudes, bullying, dropout, school connectedness, violence that have been seen with effect of school environment. The most studied of which is the role of school environment on the academic achievement of the students. Empirical relation between the same has also been proved through several meta-analysis (Bektas, Çogaltay, Karadag, Ay, 2015). Another insightful fact related to research in school climate is that the empirical body remains largely partial towards correlational methods as opposed to experimental methods when studying school climate (Thapa, et. al., 2013).

Review of school climate research points out towards a need for researches in the Indian context to align with the depth of school environment researches globally. Aligning with global research trends in school environment would help not just in understanding school environment holistically, but also in identifying context-specific problems and solutions in an efficient way. This would set us on the course of achieving the SDG targets related to learning environment.

India and Transformation in Education

All 193 members of UN have adopted the Sustainable development goals, India being a part of it. Data suggests that no country has achieved the goals fully, India however is far behind. According to 2018 Global SDG Index ranking, India is ranked at 112 of 156 countries still falling behind countries like- Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and African countries like Ghana, Tunisia. India is performing moderately poorly in education (SDG 4) and extremely poorly in gender inequality (SDG 5), social inequalities (SDG 10) among seven other categories. India has been performing poorly in other international studies like PISA, OECD, the results of which are in consonance with the above indicators.

Governmental organizations all around world place importance on improving school climate as a means of improving the quality of education. For example, US department of Education in 2007 came out with a program called- Safe and Supportive schools. UN’s Child Friendly Schools Manual (UNICEF, 2009) addressed school environment from a multitude of perspective. It talks about location, design, construction of schools, also addressing the school-community link and addressing the role of various stakeholders in the same respect. Safe School Declaration, was another such attempt, which came out in 2015 as an inter-governmental effort to make schools safe, it has now been endorsed by 80 countries worldwide. India unfortunately is not a part of the same.

In the Indian context, NCF (2005) does try to paint a picture of a positive, conducive environment for learning but it is largely limited in depth with which it tries to engage in the topic. Having allocated a whole chapter to school and classroom environment, it does not do justice to veracity of the topic. It fails to incorporate effective research and incite innovativeness and merely remains as a brief summary that provides a vague idea to teachers.

A safe and inclusive school environment is a projection of our larger issue of the creation of global environment that imbibes the same values. This global environment of the world is what that the SDG talks about. The need for a safe and inclusive global environment has emerged from the primary concerns that the world is facing global threats in terms of global warming, climate change, the widening gap between the rich and the poor that is hampering our path to sustainable development. SDG goals also address major social objectives like gender equality (SDG 5), reducing inequalities (SDG 10). A school is many times addressed as a mini-society and school environment is a reflection of a society’s environment at large. India is a country of diversity; however, this diversity has taken the face of division in terms of religion, class, caste, gender more so in the recent times. These notions are reflected, and perpetuated in the schools and classrooms, through leaders, teachers, parents, and students. Thus, the SDG 5 and SDG 4 work in tandem and quality education, especially in terms of schools, cannot be achieved without specific focus on the school environments.

Discussion and Implication

The idea of bringing about a change in SDGs, for an individual country, is described as a multi-stakeholder process where no single stakeholder is responsible for taking the charge. This multi-stakeholder process includes- the government, business, academia, and civil society. No one is responsible and everyone is responsible.

The idea of inter-generational justice and inter-generational sustainability which formed the base of the argument of Brundtland Commission, should be seen in the context of schools as well. The idea is to make the present system such that it accommodates the needs of the future students. Let’s take the help of physical environment of the school to elaborate on this idea. In especially the government schools we see an abundance of furniture that is fixed and does not aspire creativity, or does not support conduction of a variety of activities involving movement and group discussions. With the RTE in place and major global initiatives like UEE, and SDGs itself, the rapid construction of schools is being carried out with a short-term focus of providing bare-minimum basic facilities in the school. These are being carried out using outdated models and designs for construction which are 200 years old eliciting our inability to foresee the future. This would result in massive crisis in future as these would not accommodate the needs of the future students and would leave no space for upgradation and limit our abilities for innovation in education. Construction of buildings and furniture acquirement in schools is a massive, one-time, long-term investment and should be done with forethought for flexibility in the future. It is the role of policy makers to be able to anticipate and accommodate the needs of the future in the present goals.

Governmental organizations need to define a set of clear-eyed goals with respect to improvement of school environment. SDGs, especially the target related to learning environment, can be easily be termed as imprecise but this is important as it leaves the room for accommodating context-specific needs and setting of context-specific goals. We can achieve these goals through careful planning and engagement of diverse stakeholders.

Conclusion

Goal-based development should be further taken up by governments for specific goals for target development of learning environments. In the case of school environments, we need to come up with country specific targets to be achieved in order to fulfill the larger aim of creating a learning environment that is safe, inclusive, and effective for learning.