Sustainability Skills Survey 2025
Sustainability is an issue that affects everyone, whether they recognize it or not. From the choices we make when selecting products in our weekly shops and sorting our waste to more increasingly severe effects of climate change destroying habitats and endangering wildlife. For some, these issues cause conscious changes to their lifestyles, whereas for others, these issues still aren’t a priority.
When it comes to students and the issues of sustainability, they’re regularly put into one of two categories – the advocates and the apathetic. In order to develop our approach to sustainability as a Union it is important to identify whether students do care about sustainability so that we can lobby and work with the university to create intra- and extra-curricular opportunities that appropriately engage students in these areas.
Each year in an endeavour to answer these questions, SUSU promote the Students Organizing for Sustainability (SOS-UK) sustainability skills survey. SOS-UK are an organisation that focuses its attention on student attitudes towards sustainability. For the purpose of the survey, it was advertised as a sustainability survey asking students about their time at university and the skills they may have learned.
SOS-UK have used the findings of the research in order to better tailor their sustainability projects across the country, including projects such as Green Impact, Student Switch Off, Student Eats and Responsible Futures.
The survey contained questions pertaining to reasons for choice of course and university, what learning methods and experience they have had on their courses so far, and what their plans for their future might be. For our purposes as a students’ union, we’ll focus on the results of some of the questions relating to their learning and teaching methods, skills they have developed, and how this impacts future career choices.
We chose these areas as we work closely with the University through our Academic Representation system and regularly make positive changes to the curriculum and assessment methods, and also with the Swansea Employability Academy to input into potential employers and roles that students would be interested in seeing attend.
The survey ran between the 28th October and 17th November 2024, and was shared with students by the Union’s central social media channels, an all-student email, and the University’s sustainability department. 562 individual responses were submitted by Swansea University Students, which is a positive response rate, but still only 2.6% of the student body.
Therefore, it is important to note that although this begins to inform us of particular student mentalities, and responses were from a wide variety of courses and faculties, there is still a large untapped majority of the student body that may feel different to these results, or even fit into the apathetic category.
In order for an institution to receive their data after the completion of the survey, at least 100 responses needed to be submitted, after which SOS-UK collated the data from participating institutions and shared it with us. Although Swansea University have secured over 100 responses for a few years, rather than looking at trends between years, we’ll instead look at the 24/25 responses only as a snapshot into students’ attitudes.
One example from the results of the data is that although all forms of learning styles proved to be beneficial to students in developing their skills and understanding of issues taught in their course, case studies and problem-based learning that looked at real world examples of local and global issues were deemed most beneficial by students.
Less grounded stimulus activities, such as providing a prompt (such as a poem, dance, artwork, quotation, piece of music or newspaper article) to stimulate discussion or reflection on a topic, was deemed least beneficial by students.
Despite the satisfaction that students felt around the different reaching styles, it’s evident from other questions from the survey that students feel that their education still isn’t entirely reflective of what they hope to achieve. In a question asking how much their education has prepared them to meet the challenges of climate change, the nature crisis, and inequalities caused by these two things, there was an overwhelming response of unpreparedness.
The majority of answers fell in the category of somewhat, with a mean average score of 2.67 for the climate crisis and 2.52 for the nature crisis.
It seems that when it comes to where the responsibility should lie for incorporating and promoting sustainable development, the majority of students think that places of study and apprentices should take the greatest ownership.
Whereas students felt that the onus to incorporate this information by teaching staff and tutors into their learning materials was less appropriate.
A wider institutional approach should be taken, rather than specific members of teaching staff and courses. There was also an emphasis on Students’ Unions to take action, which is in line with what we’ve witnessed in our termly student forums and our executive committees.
Further work will be done internally to break down this information and further impact our Sustainability Action Plan for 2025 – 2028.