Fifty school leaders walked into a room at Kodolányi University in Budapest with very different stories. Some came from countries with national sustainability programmes, dedicated funding, and child-led school committees. Others came from systems where each region – sometimes each school – figures it out alone. What you do with the given situation, is what defines you as a leader.
The workshop was held as part of the ESHA General Assembly, as SYNAPSES moves towards its close. It opened with a participant from one of the project’s summer schools sharing what she had taken back to her school, and then she invited her students to speak too. After that, the group split into four round tables, each led by a school head with hands-on experience of the project. Participants reflected on what they had encountered across best practices, pedagogy, and capacity building, discussed what SYNAPSES had meant to them, and thought about what they would want to see next.
What came out of the room was honest and varied. Ireland has one of the more developed national frameworks, built around the Green Schools Initiative, with child-led committees and a dedicated role at school level to drive sustainability forward. Cyprus has made sustainability mandatory, requiring every school to have its own sustainability plan. Switzerland, meanwhile, has no national programme at all and each canton decides for itself. Hearing all of this in one room, from people living it, made the value of a network like SYNAPSES feel very concrete.
Some of the most memorable moments came from specific school examples. A Dutch school had been focusing on two Sustainable Development Goals per year, no more, no less. These are woven through all subjects and activities; running a vintage store, and bringing in guest speakers. Their reward system for competitions was a particular highlight: winners get an overnight school sleepover with games and films, and a day off the following day. It’s the kind of idea that travels.
A shared frustration ran through the discussions: sustainability too often sits at the edges of school life, a one-off project or a special week, rather than something genuinely woven into how a school operates day to day. The call for cross-curricular integration was consistent: connect sustainability to maths, to science, to geography, and resist the pull to treat it as its own separate thing. There was, however, strong agreement that sustainability initiatives need a dedicated champion inside the school structure to keep pushing.
What people valued most was the chance to talk to each other: the group discussions, the good practices from other countries, the sense of not being alone in trying to make this work.
Think global, act local. It’s not a new phrase, but in a room full of people doing exactly that, it carried some weight. From Reykjavik to Nicosia, from Ljubljana to Limerick.
