Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- After finding that standards like Eco-Schools were hard to apply consistently across 64+ campuses, GSG built its own internal certification instead of adopting an external programme off the shelf.
- The Green School Certification (GSC) scores every campus out of 100 across five pillars, from leadership culture to physical infrastructure.
- 14 campuses were certified in year one (2024); an earlier GSG sustainability model had already scaled from 8 schools in 2021 to 20 by 2023.
- One campus, Glendale Academy India, reached the top Eco Champion tier with a 93% score on its first attempt.
- The framework’s next stop is the office: the Green Office Certification applies the same scorecard to GSG’s corporate teams.
When “Certified” Stops Meaning Something
Ask any school administrator what plaque hangs by reception and you’ll likely hear Eco-Schools before anything else. The Eco-Schools programme, run globally by the Foundation for Environmental Education, has become close to a default answer for what a sustainable campus looks like, built on a seven-step, student-led methodology that has spread to thousands of institutions worldwide.
Alongside it sits LEED for Schools, which grades buildings rather than daily behaviour, and the Green Flag award that Eco-Schools hand out to participating schools. These programmes did real work: they gave sustainability a shared vocabulary and put it on the agenda in institutions that might otherwise have left it off entirely.
But a 2026 paper from the Global Centre for Education Excellence (GCEE), the research and quality arm of Global Schools Group (GSG), makes a case that will sound familiar to anyone managing a multi-campus network: a badge designed for one school in one country does not travel well to sixty-four. External frameworks were built with national or regional contexts in mind, and applying them consistently across a network spanning different regulators, climates, and resourcing levels tends to turn a sustainable school award into a compliance exercise rather than a lasting cultural shift (Balakrishnan et al., 2026). The paper argues the real barrier was internal ownership, not the ambition of the outside standards themselves.
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Building a Scorecard That Fits the Network
Ask any school administrator what plaque hangs by reception and you’ll likely hear Eco-Schools before anything else. The Eco-Schools programme, run globally by the Foundation for Environmental Education, has become close to a default answer for what a sustainable campus looks like, built on a seven-step, student-led methodology that has spread to thousands of institutions worldwide.
Alongside it sits LEED for Schools, which grades buildings rather than daily behaviour, and the Green Flag award that Eco-Schools hand out to participating schools. These programmes did real work: they gave sustainability a shared vocabulary and put it on the agenda in institutions that might otherwise have left it off entirely.
Rather than discard external references, GCEE folded them in. The design of GSG’s Green School Certification (GSC) drew on the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and ESG criteria, while consultations with principals and campus operations teams surfaced how uneven sustainability was already being tracked from campus to campus. Some schools had dedicated green teams and carbon data; others had almost nothing written down.
That gap became the design brief: a single hundred-point scorecard, flexible enough to meet a campus wherever its school campus sustainability work currently stood, but structured enough to make progress comparable across the network.
The result is five pillars, each scored on a four-level scale running from no evidence of action to exemplary performance.
Building a Scorecard That Fits the Network
Pillar | What It Measures |
Eco Heartware | Leadership, staff and student buy-in; sustainability as identity, not a side project |
Environmental Management | Tracked, reduced energy, water, waste and carbon data |
Sustainability Learning | Sustainability woven across subjects and co-curricular life |
Community Connect | Partnerships with local communities, government and environmental groups |
Green Infrastructure | Energy-efficient buildings, renewables, water systems, biodiversity |
Building a Scorecard That Fits the Network
Eco Heartware and Environmental Management carry the heaviest weighting, reflecting a view echoed across the sustainability-in-education literature: culture and daily operating habits do more long-term work than a single green building ever will. Four tiers of recognition, Eco Initiator, Eco Achiever, Eco Leader, and Eco Champion, let a campus just starting out and a campus already running climate audits sit on the same ladder without one making the other look irrelevant.
EVIDENCE INSIGHT The two heaviest-weighted pillars are also the hardest to photograph for a brochure, leadership behaviour and utility data, a signal that the framework rewards substance over showcase projects. |
The Numbers Behind the Model
Certification only matters if it changes what actually happens on campus, and GSG’s own figures give an early read. An earlier GJET paper describing the 5S Approach that underpins the GSC shows the programme growing from eight schools in 2021 to fourteen in 2022 and twenty by 2023, with a tracked sustainability index for one campus climbing from seven to ten within a single year.
Awareness surveys at that same campus showed policy awareness jumped from roughly ten to ninety percent and SDG knowledge more than doubled, alongside gains in measured indicators such as biodiversity counts and per-capita paper consumption.
These are self-reported, network-internal figures rather than independently audited results, but they are among the more granular numbers a sustainable school programme of this kind has published.
Year | Participating Schools | Notable Metric |
2021 | 8 | Programme launch |
2022 | 14 | Expansion phase |
2023 | 20 | Sustainability index: 7 → 10 (sample campus, within-year) |
2024 (GSC launch) | 14 certified / 18 engaged | Top score: 93% — Eco Champion tier |
By the time the GSC itself launched in 2024, fourteen campuses earned certification in its first cycle, and one, Glendale Academy India, reached the top Eco Champion tier with a ninety-three percent score on its first attempt.
That kind of jump from a pilot cohort to a top-tier score is exactly the outcome the framework was built to surface, not a single flagship initiative, but a campus-wide pattern of leadership engagement, data discipline, and student-led activity scoring consistently high across all five pillars at once, showing how eco-friendly school projects can compound into measurable institutional change rather than staying isolated events.
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What Campus Leaders Actually Said
The qualitative record adds texture where the scorecard alone cannot. Campus leaders across GIIS Tokyo, Witty International School India, One World International School Sarjapur, India, and Regent International School in Malaysia described the certification process as clarifying rather than burdensome; several credited named Sustainability Ambassador roles and structured feedback reports for turning vague good intentions into a concrete roadmap.
GSG’s Chief Executive Officer, Rajeev Katyal, framed the initiative as serving two audiences at once: campuses that consume fewer resources and cut costs, and students who leave with a genuine habit of sustainable thinking rather than a certificate to file away, a sign of how sustainability is becoming a core part of school education strategies rather than an add-on programme.
The same reporting was candid about friction. Campuses struggled to gather consistent utility and waste data where technical infrastructure varied, and some GSC criteria proved too advanced for early-years and primary-only campuses, prompting GCEE to adjust scoring for younger cohorts rather than force a poor fit.
Staff training emerged as the most requested support, a reminder that even a well-designed scorecard depends on people who know how to fill it in. Both findings map onto a wider concern in the education-for-sustainable-development literature: frameworks succeed or stall based on whether they build lasting staff capacity, not just measurement systems.
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From Classrooms to Corridors and Now to Offices
GSG’s response to that lesson was to extend the same logic into a completely different environment. The Green Office Certification takes the GSC’s tiered scorecard into GSG’s corporate and administrative offices, swapping curriculum and student leadership criteria for workplace culture, procurement, and paperless operations. GIFTech, GSG’s technology arm in India, became the first office certified under the model, scoring well on digital-process efficiency and staff-led green initiatives.
The move signals that, inside GSG at least, how to improve sustainability in schools and how to improve it in a back office are treated as versions of the same organisational design problem rather than separate agendas.
A parallel strand of GJET research suggests where this could head next. A companion 2026 paper on artificial intelligence in sustainability education argues that adaptive tools could help schools model resource use, personalise sustainability inquiry for students, and support the kind of systems thinking the GSC’s Environmental Management pillar already asks campuses to demonstrate . None of this is built into the certification yet, but it points to a plausible next iteration: a scorecard that does not just record utility data but helps a campus interpret it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can schools become environmentally sustainable?
The GSC model suggests the entry point is not one flagship project but five parallel habits: visible leadership commitment, measured resource use, sustainability content spread across subjects rather than a single themed week, outside partnerships, and infrastructure upgrades planned over time. Campuses that tried to shortcut straight to the last item, buildings, without the first four generally found certification harder to sustain.
How is sustainability becoming a core part of school education strategies?
Institutionally, the shift shows up as measurement. Schools once treated sustainability as an annual event, but frameworks like the GSC and the 5S model that preceded it embedded quarterly-tracked KPIs, dedicated coordinator roles, and scored curriculum integration into everyday operations, turning what was a project into a standing part of strategy.
What role does SDG 4 play in national education systems?
SDG 4, Quality Education, is the anchor most school sustainability frameworks cite, since it explicitly links access to education with sustainable development and global citizenship outcomes rather than enrolment numbers alone. Both GSG papers reviewed here, along with the UNESCO roadmap they draw on, treat SDG 4 as the policy mandate that justifies embedding sustainability inside the curriculum rather than leaving it to extracurricular clubs.
Is Eco-Schools still worth pursuing alongside an internal framework?
GSG’s own paper does not dismiss Eco-Schools, LEED, or the Green Flag award; it treats them as credible reference points that shaped the GSC’s design. For a single-campus school without the resourcing to build a custom framework, an established external certification such as Eco-Schools remains a reasonable, well-tested starting point for how to make schools more sustainable in a structured way.
Author Bio
Vikram Balakrishnan, Rathin Khandhadia, and Smita Warnekar are affiliated with the Global Centre for Education Excellence (GCEE) at Global Schools Group, Singapore, and collaborated on this paper examining the GSG Green School Certification Framework.
Khandhadia is a Director at GCEE and brings a background as a quality expert across industries including steel, telecom, energy, and education, driving continuous excellence in teaching and learning. Warnekar serves as Deputy Manager, Sustainability at GCEE, where she advances sustainability initiatives and environmental programs across GSG's global network of schools. Balakrishnan has contributed to this work as part of the GCEE team.
