Sustainability in Education: How The Alliance for Sustainable Schools (TASS) is addressing Systems-Level Sustainability Challenges within School Systems Worldwide

Anthony Dixon is the founder and Chairman of The Alliance for Sustainable Schools (TASS), a non-profit network of schools working together to address and resolve system-level sustainability challenges. He is also the CEO of Metanoia, a consultancy working with schools to make a difference in the sustainability of their campus and community through practical, accessible and effective solutions that also educate and empower students, and Helios Renewable Energy Ltd.  – a solar energy company.

Anthony’s diverse career has included being Chief Executive Officer of ASB Biodiesel, Managing Director of Citigroup, Director of China Hydroelectric Corporation, Chief Operating Officer of ZEDFactory (a zero-carbon housing company), and Director of the Solar Electric Light Company. He holds an undergraduate degree in physics, a master's in renewable energy engineering from Imperial College, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

This year Anthony Dixon is the Speaker of the leading education conference & exhibition in the Middle East region: GESS Dubai (30 October - 1 November 2023). Extensive conference programme together with the exhibition provides educators access to the products and solutions that meet the needs of the modern classroom and transform the way students learn. Sustainability is one of the event’s important themes.

Anna T: Where did the idea for The Alliance for Sustainable Schools come from?

Anthony D:  In 2018, I was installing solar energy in some schools in Hong Kong and a group of students said to me: “We are going to organise the very first school strike for Fridays” (the first in Hong Kong). The Greta Thunberg Fridays For Future movement was just taking off at the time and they wanted to join the hundreds of thousands of other students around the world in organising a coordinated worldwide strike to protest the lack of action on climate change.  The implicit message is «What is the point of attending school when the planet is burning and no one’s acting with the appropriate urgency.

The students asked me to provide a technical review of the manifesto they planned to present to the government of Hong Kong outlining their recommendations for more renewable energy and so on.

Thousands of people, including parents and students and other members of the school community, gathered in the town centre and marched to government offices to present government officials with that manifesto. It was at that moment that I realised that there was a huge opportunity to effect change here within schools. It dawned on me that if students presented their school principals with ideas for more sustainable practices, they were more likely to see them acted on than if they waited for government officials.

I set up a consulting business (Metanoia) to help students and schools to change the environmental footprint of their individual school campuses and then I set up The Alliance for Sustainable Schools (TASS) with the mission of bringing schools together to demonstrate alternative, more sustainable ways of doing things and to lobby their suppliers like bus companies and caterers to operate more sustainably.

Anna T: How do you think The Alliance will impact sustainability in schools?

Anthony D: Schools’ impact on the environment mostly comes from four things – school buses, school food, school uniforms and school buildings. But historically at least, these have not been the things that most schools focus their sustainability initiatives on because the impacts of those things are not very visible – they are mostly in the supply chains rather than on campus.

And also they are harder to change because they involve third-party suppliers who have established ways of providing a service to hundreds of clients and are not likely to change based on a request from just one school.

So what this means is that the things most schools focus on when it comes to sustainability don’t make a big difference, and the things that would make a big difference don’t get focused on because they are difficult for individual schools to influence on their own.

But that’s no longer the case if schools come together to act collectively in these areas. Schools acting together can have a significant influence on suppliers, and we think that’s, even more, the case when we get students involved. What one school can’t achieve in a discussion with its bus company, its uniform supplier, its catering company or its architect, 20 schools and their 15,000 students almost certainly can.

That’s one way TASS will impact sustainability in schools.

Another way is through the Charter. When schools join TASS, the head of the school signs the Sustainable Schools Charter. The Charter is a promise to their students and the other members of the Alliance to operate the school according to a set of sustainability principles.  They sign it in front of the students and it's very public – we post these photos on social media and our website and the school does too. At the end of each year, we ask the students to assess how the school has done in living up to this promise so there’s accountability there.

As our membership grows, more and more schools sign the charter and we get a magnetic field-like effect. Where once we may have had 100 schools all pointing in different directions in terms of their sustainability efforts, now they’re all aligned with the Charter and I believe the simple fact of this alignment will contribute to our impact over time. From a systems change point of view, I just think it’s much better to have 100 schools doing four similar things than 100 schools doing 100 different things.

Anna T: Why did you start in Hong Kong and when did you decide to go global?