Trust the Professionals: Olly Newton on Why FE Needs Autonomy to Develop Green Skills

The green mindset isn’t important for FE because policymakers say so. It’s important because young people care about it and businesses need it. That’s the starting point for Olly Newton, Executive Director of the Edge Foundation, speaking at the Green Mindset Micro-Collective event.

His argument is straightforward: if FE is the hub between young people and the world of work, then getting on top of the green mindset isn’t optional. But doing it well requires something the sector doesn’t always get enough of: trust.

Why It Matters

“Green mindset is important for FE and skills because it’s important to young people. It’s driving their thinking at the moment and it’s important to a lot of businesses,” Olly explains.

The logic is simple. FE exists to prepare young people for work. Young people care about sustainability. Businesses need employees who understand it. Therefore, “this is really important for FE and HE to get on top of.”

This isn’t about compliance or box-ticking. It’s about meeting learners where they are and equipping them for the workplaces that will employ them.

Making It Real

When asked about small changes that work, Olly points to employer engagement. “One of those is getting employers engaged in really practical ways. So working in schools, colleges and higher education to share projects they’re working on to get the students working on practical ideas for their own business to become more sustainable.”

The key is making sustainability concrete rather than abstract. “So it becomes really real and not too theoretical.”

Students working on actual business challenges understand sustainability differently than students learning about it in theory. That practical connection matters.

The Trust Question

But Olly’s main message is about what needs to change at a systemic level. “I’d love to see more trust being given from the centre, from government down to FE principals down to staff and down to young people getting involved as well.”

Why does trust matter so much? “I think this is such an emotive issue. We need to kind of push that trust down and let the professionals who know what they’re doing in their classroom engage and develop kind of green skills in their way.”

This is a direct challenge to top-down approaches. Sustainability engages people emotionally. That’s a strength, not a weakness. But it means standardised approaches are likely to fail. What works is trusting professionals to develop green skills in ways that work for their context, their students, and their communities.

Broader Skills, Shared Solutions

Olly makes an interesting connection between green skills and broader educational challenges. “What we need to do to support our educators to be catalysts in this space is actually very similar to a lot of the areas that we talk about.”

The answer involves trust, “the ability to develop young people’s broader skills,” and “the space in the curriculum to think about problem solving, to think about teamwork.”

Green mindset becomes one focus among others. “Of course one of the focuses of that will be green mindset but also another might be social justice or AI.”

This efficiency matters. “I think it’s a nice efficient one because they’re similar things to solve this issue as to solve a lot of the other issues that we’re talking about.”

Rather than treating sustainability as yet another separate requirement, Olly suggests it fits naturally into the broader work of developing problem-solving, teamwork, and critical thinking skills. The solutions that enable good teaching of green skills are the same solutions that enable good teaching generally: trust, autonomy, and curriculum space.

The Autonomy Challenge

Olly’s vision is clear but challenging. It requires government to trust FE principals, principals to trust their staff, and everyone to trust young people to engage meaningfully with emotive, complex issues.

It requires accepting that there isn’t one right way to develop green skills, and that professionals in classrooms are best placed to determine what works for their students.

And it requires creating curriculum space for the kind of problem-solving and teamwork that makes sustainability real rather than theoretical.

As Olly makes clear, the sector already knows how to do this. The solutions for embedding green mindset are the same solutions needed across education: trust professionals, create space for broader skills development, and let practitioners engage learners in ways that work for their context.

The question is whether the system is ready to provide that trust and autonomy.

Watch the full interview with Olly Newton: