Becoming Otherwise: The Fragility of Whole School Approaches to Transformative Sustainability Education

Abstract

This article examines how a UK independent school sought to embed sustainability through a Whole School Approach (WSA). Semi-structured interviews with eight staff and analysis of institutional documents were interpreted using reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes emerged: sustainability was framed as both moral value and strategic necessity; leadership was committed yet constrained; structural mechanisms created coherence but translated inconsistently into pedagogy; student agency was celebrated rhetorically but rarely institutionalised; and teachers carried significant emotional labour in response to students’ climate anxieties.

Taken together, these dynamics show how WSAs generate surface coherence when structural instruments are not coupled with cultural and relational depth. Interpreting the case through an ontological lens frames transformation as a question of who learners and institutions are becoming in relation to human and more than human worlds. Recent work on leadership for flourishing sharpens this analysis by identifying dispositions of trust, attentiveness, courage, and co-creativity.

The article proposes a mid-level model linking structural instruments to cultural levers; leadership as ethical discernment, epistemic justice through student co decision, and ethical atmospheres that integrate affect. It positions WSAs as fragile yet necessary experiments in institutional becoming and argues they should be judged by their capacity to cultivate conditions of flourishing rather than by structural coherence alone.

Keywords: transformative sustainability education; whole school approach; flourishing leadership; ontology; epistemic justice; affect