by Simon Lightman FRSA
“SEEd does not treat sustainability as a checklist of outcomes. It frames it as a living inquiry… in a world defined by complexity, precarity and loss. It is from this standpoint that I serve as a trustee.”
In 2017, during the huaicos – the flash floods that swept through Peru, disproportionately devastating the country’s poorest communities – I passed the American Embassy in Lima and saw a man watering the grass despite a hosepipe ban. Curious and somewhat bewildered, I asked him why. He looked up, paused, and said quietly, “Because if I don’t, I’ll lose my job.”
The moment was ordinary. Just one man, one hose, one patch of grass. But it catalysed a shift in how I understood the climate crisis, bringing into focus the entanglement of environmental degradation with labour, dignity, inequality, and historical injustice.
Gardender, Lynniet17, Pixabay
His actions, though seemingly contradictory, were not irrational. They revealed how the systems we live within often force individuals to choose between short-term survival and long-term sustainability, between complicity and consequence. The flooding, which displaced thousands from informal settlements, was not simply a natural disaster. It was a structural event, exposing how colonial legacies, racialised infrastructures, and economic precarity shape who is exposed, who is protected, and who is heard.
That encounter marked the beginning of a journey that has shaped my work in education, not only as a teacher and leader, but as a systems thinker committed to the belief that education, when designed with care and relational intent, can serve a greater purpose than the transfer of knowledge. It can create space for reflection, support the unlearning of dominant assumptions, and open the way to transformation that responds not only to science but to lived realities and ethical complexity.
A Journey Begins…
At King Edward’s Witley, I designed the Bridewell Diploma as a whole-school curriculum framework that embeds sustainability, leadership, and ethical agency into the everyday life of the school. This draws on global citizenship education, critical pedagogy, and systems thinking as practical tools to help students navigate an uncertain, interdependent, and often unjust world. Rather than treating sustainability as a standalone topic, it nurtures cultures of dialogue, purpose, and responsibility that extend beyond individual achievement toward collective flourishing.
Simon Lightman FRSA
This ethos shapes my work beyond the classroom. I founded the City of London Youth Natural Environment Board (YNEB) to provide a platform for young people across the City’s schools to shape environmental policy, hold institutions accountable, and model new forms of climate leadership. YNEB is not a simulation of citizenship – it is a real space of political agency, where intergenerational dialogue is both challenging and transformative.
I also lead Green Futures, an annual changemakers competition across the City of London schools. It invites students to create community-rooted responses to environmental and social challenges, using systems thinking, empathy, and creativity. Alongside this, I am developing Hip Hop for the Planet, a project using rhythm and lyricism to engage young people in conversations about climate justice, identity, and resistance.
Internationally, I work to centre storytelling, plurality, and relational knowledge. As co-lead of Beyond the Blue, a global ocean storytelling initiative, we have elevated youth and Indigenous voices in the fight for ocean justice. The climate crisis is not only a material emergency. It is also a crisis of voice, of memory, and of epistemic exclusion.
From Work To Research
These experiences inform, and are informed by, my academic research. I am currently completing an MA in Global Learning at University College London, where my dissertation explores how school leaders conceptualise and implement whole-school approaches to transformative sustainability education. This work underpins the consultancy and training I offer to schools and organisations aiming to move from symbolic initiatives to systemic change. It has also shown me that institutional transformation is not only about structure. It is equally about culture, relationships, and values, often beginning in places that feel most vulnerable or contested.
In parallel, I am contributing to two forthcoming book chapters, one examining how AI is reshaping what is knowable, teachable, and governable in education, and the other, exploring how we might reorient education away from narrow attainment and toward the cultivation of ethical, ecological, and intergenerational responsibility. These themes also animate Structures and Selves, my longform writing series exploring the philosophical and systemic dimensions of education in an age of collapse and reconfiguration.
A Journey to SEEd
It is from this standpoint, and with these experiences, that I serve as a trustee of SEEd, an organisation whose mission deeply aligns with my own. SEEd does not treat sustainability as a checklist of outcomes. It frames it as a living inquiry, one that asks what kind of education is possible, and what kind is necessary, in a world defined by complexity, precarity, and loss. Through my role, I aim to support SEEd’s programmes and both local and global pedagogies that hold space for difficult conversations, foster justice, and nurture the imagination needed to co-create more liveable futures, for youth and adults alike.
SEEd’s Cabinet of Sustainability Curiosities
What gives me hope is not the belief that all problems can be solved. It is the growing awareness, across classrooms and communities, that education can offer more than preparation for the status quo. I see it in the quiet, persistent acts that refuse simplification, that make space for ambiguity, and that invite new ways of thinking, relating, and being. And I return often to the image of that man with his hose, standing quietly in a flooded city, not as a symbol of despair, but as a reminder that change begins with recognition, and with the courage to act differently within systems we may not yet be able to transform. In those small openings, charged with honesty and intention, I find the reason, and the responsibility, to keep doing this work.
Simon Lightman FRSA
Featured photo by annawaldl, Pixabay
