Riding the wave of sustainability: Integrating OSH into education

Abstract

Sustainable development calls for an urgent shift from discourse to action and concerted efforts to find effective ways to achieve it. With concrete goals in mind, and especially targeting good health and well-being, quality education, decent work and economic growth, our paper proposes a solution for sustainably integrating occupational safety and health (OSH) into education. It combines theoretical foundations and empirical evidence in an innovative approach to integrating OSH into secondary school teaching practices. The empirical evidence comes from the Mind Safety – Safety Matters! initiative, a pan-European project involving Estonia, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey. Our findings include i) an analysis of the positions and controversies around teachers as core stakeholders; ii) barriers and facilitators of OSH integration into education; and iii) a minimum viable platform, an ICT tool designed for interacting, consulting and sharing materials and experiences in this specific field. Our main contribution consists in envisioning, orchestrating and validating a solution to the challenge of integrating OSH into schools to ultimately assist in translating into action selected sustainable development goals. The proposed formula targets the very young generation as possible predecessors of future professionals who will be more sensitive and receptive to effective and impactful business responsibility and sustainability initiatives and practices, by means of introducing the lifelong learning of OSH.