#GreenFE - it's our time

Honoured to represent Fircroft College of Adult Education at #WMWGreenSkillsSummit today, giving the following talk alongside #GreenChangemakers Rose Golding (Dudley College) and Donna Wilson (Coventry College).

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Are we serious about tackling the climate emergency? #FE is uniquely placed in public service to be a significant nexus of change...because we are all about #skills. That's what we do. And, as Liam Carr said yesterday at the #SustainFE group, if all jobs are going to be green in the future, all courses need to be about #GreenSkills now.

#FE needs a sea-change if this is going to happen - a mindset change, a culture change, a systems change. And fast. A #GreenStrategy is not enough. A #GreenSkillsCoordinator is not enough - not on their own. We need a critical mass of #GreenChangemakers and this devolution project is allowing us to develop a model that every combined authority can use.

I'm facilitating what's formally known as the Green Skills Teacher Training Programme at Fircroft College, part of the West Midlands Combined Authority Sustainable Futures LSIF project. We are training 40 #GreenChangemakers to organise, influence and drive change within their organisations, to keep momentum going long-term, until every course is a green skills course. You'll hear about that perspective-changing course from Donna and Rose in a minute.

Our programme needs teachers. We need teachers from every single subject area - not just our wonderful biologists and green engineers but hairdressers, animal specialists, our design and media creatives, our historians and script-writers, our nurses-to-be, our adult educators, our sixth form lecturers, our maths and English specialists. The one-day #TrainTheGreenSkillsTrainers courses need filling up to the brim with teachers from every subject area - use the QR code to pick up the link, find me on social media or contact Colleges West Midlands. Send them to us! Every learning provider in the region is in scope so please help us get the word out - fast. Delivery ends as the Easter holidays begin.

I love a Venn Diagram and this one illustrates how we need both changemakers and teachers, for sustainable change. #GreenChangemakers clearing the way, influencing the systems, structures and hierarchies to make room for change in the organisation; #GreenSkillsTeachers doing the work we need doing, running green courses for green jobs.

We are framing the whole programme around AimHi Earth's excellent '15 Green Skills, Clearly Explained' (I love that they are called that). We could have used many framings, including the SDGs, but this one hits differently. Every single one of us can find parts of our own skillset in those 15 Green Skills and that compels us to accept it's on us and gives us the confidence to change. We can't just leave it to the green architects and heat pump engineers. There's no excuse to feel powerless if we're good at long-term thinking, psychological awareness, contrarian communication (my favourite), kindness, alliance building, diplomatic storytelling, information literacy and all the rest. We can do this.

Finally, after sending all your teachers to us, I would love you to consider how you use the word 'sustainable'. It's an important word in changemaking work and when we use it to mean 'green skills' we lose the sense of it that we need the most: its use as an adjective to indicate change which has momentum and longevity. We also miss an opportunity to - finally - take our place centre stage.

Green jobs need green courses. Green courses need green skills. Let's call Green Skills, Green Skills - because we are FE and that's what we do.

Link to sign up: https://forms.office.com/e/iJSQ19yXSR?

#GreenCoursesForGreenJobs #Sustainability #GreenChangemakers #GreenSkills #Changemakers #SustainFE