The world summit in August should put sustainability higher up the education sector's agenda, says Sara Parkin.

More than a year ago, education was passed over as a theme for August's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The lobby to place it on the agenda was neither convincing nor strong. The heavy troops of the educational establishment were nowhere to be seen.

Until recently the UK education sector appeared to be oblivious to sustainable development's place on the policy agenda, and blind to the role education might have to play. Individual academics are contributing to the science and policy of sustainability through teaching and research, but supporting government policies and infrastructure are conspicuous by their absence.

Coincident with this spring's budget, the Treasury published two reports, one with the Department for Education and Skills on workplace skills and the other with the Department of Trade and Industry on science and engineering skills needs. While both acknowledge that the UK has a skills gap compared with other countries, neither reflects on what skills might actually be needed over the next ten, 20 or 50 years. Yet, if policy is driving towards more efficient use of energy and other resources and neighbourhood-renewal strategies that can deliver environmental and social benefits, what are the knowledge and skills we need to equip our graduates? What does employability mean in an economy based on radically less energy and raw materials and that has to operate in a world where markets, communications and environmental problems are on a global scale?

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The DFES cannot claim it knows nothing about all this. In 1997 a sustainable development education panel was set up by prime minister Tony Blair to give advice to the education and environment departments. The DFES has scarcely sought that advice. When higher education minister Margaret Hodge exhorts vice-chancellors to modernise and reform, she talks in terms of governance, regional positioning, and business efficiency. She does not ask them to modernise to produce better-prepared leaders for the 21st century. But this surely is what universities are for - to provide the intellectual leadership to help us make sense of today's challenges, while preparing people and tools to grasp them in positive and constructive ways.

This century has started with international conflict, terrorism and business catastrophe. A piece of polar ice about the size of Cambridgeshire has broken off as a result of global warming. In Johannesburg, world leaders will consider the context of these events, the stage on which the next century will be played out. They will hear about the lack of real progress in slowing, never mind reversing, the major trends in climate change and loss of biological mass and diversity. They will discuss the persistence of poverty and the growth of inequality at a time of unprecedented global wealth.

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The UK delegation will come back with a to-do list. Education may well be on it, at worst because there is nothing else new to say, and at best because world leaders recognise at last that to successfully implement any strategy depends on building the right human capital. If people are not equipped with the right sort of knowledge and skills, they cannot make decisions and act in a way that favours sustainable rather than unsustainable development.

There are signs that the education sector is responding. Sustainable development has appeared in the new school curriculum. Universities UK is to set up a strategic working group. And the funding councils support the Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability, a collaboration between UK sustainability charity Forum for the Future and 18 universities and colleges. It is a three-year UK-wide initiative that began in 2000 and helps partners to integrate sustainability into strategic planning, estate-management priorities, purchasing policy and transport plans. This year the focus is on finance and resource management, the curriculum, communications and reporting.

This is a start but still far from enough. Our universities should be aiming for world-class status in producing sustainability-literate graduates as well as improving their performance as estate owners and employers.

The Environmental Audit Committee has recommended that cabinet ministers give a speech on sustainable development in the run-up to the world summit. Is this not an opportunity for education secretary Estelle Morris to use her speech to connect her department's policies on lifelong learning, widening participation, closing the skills gap and modernising universities with the DTI agenda for a competitive low-carbon economy and Mr Blair's commitment to put sustainable development at the heart of government? Now that would really make a difference.

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Sara Parkin is programme director of Forum for the Future.