Green Gems and Blue Jewels: The Virtual Green Skills Hub

On April 1st 2025, the Green Changemakers (soft) launch their Virtual Green Skills Hub, after a year of patient and dedicated ‘Bowerbirding’.

It’s been a ride.

18 months ago, both the Hub and the Green Changemakers programme looked very different: ‘green skills CPD’ and something with a green skills focus akin to the ETF’s Excellence Gateway from back in the day.

That’s how it works, right? 

But we were lucky enough to inherit a bid which was designed with spaciousness and the wisdom to set high-level deliverables with plenty of wriggle room. I’ve written elsewhere about how we quickly realised the futility of teaching subject-specific green skills from a generic standpoint (what do I know about plumbing?) It took a little longer to re-vision the Virtual Green Skills Hub.

We just love ‘stuff’ in FE, don’t we? I’ve been writing about this for years now, the way in which the mind is inexorably drawn towards ‘resources’ when one starts to think about teacher CPD, at the expense of behaviours, thinking, connections, even – sometimes – skills. Despite this, we did exactly the same. Given the Virtual Green Skills Hub assignment, we started to think about how much stuff we could get together.

Like magpies.

The Green Changemakers Programme had just kicked off and changemakers set to work, populating a Padlet with links and resources. We are a collective but big love to Green Changemaker Donna Wilson for getting us started. Within weeks, we had hundreds of assets; as the programme gathered pace, new cohorts added hundreds more. By the time we came to co-curate them into the Hub, we had thousands.

We had to pause. 

Did we want the Hub to be Amazon? Featuring everything out there of variable shelf life, as green skills science, technology and practice continued to evolve? We began to question the wisdom of creating an overwhelming space, which would begin to go out of date on the day it was launched.

Did we even want it to be Waterstones? All purpose, singing and dancing and presenting itself as having everything in stock but still that thing you wanted and expected to find is not actually there?

After all, we all have the world wide web.

We were aware that even the 40+ of us could not possibly cover the breadth and pace of learning out there around Green Skills/Sustainability/Education for Sustainable Development. We didn’t even represent every specialism in FE, which took us right back to the philosophy of Green Changemaking we’d established at the start.

Green Changemakers empowering colleagues, to positively impact culture and systems change, to create environments where every teacher is a maven, switched on to their own green skills practice so that they positioned themselves at the cutting edge of their own specialism. 

• Where climate conversations are as natural as talking about the weather.
• Where potentia is collectively released into the organisation, so that everyone plays their part in the green revolution.
• Where every action taken in FE protects and serves the environment.

A second operating system, running in concert with the hierarchy of management, to drive green skills momentum.

No, we didn’t want to be Amazon, or even Waterstones.

The magpie was the wrong metaphor. Enter the Bowerbird, and a more authentic co-design.

We’d fallen in love with the concept of the Bowerbird, hopping around the Australian forest floor, building a bower to attract a mate and decorating it with detritus of human and non-human life. Blue shiny things like feathers and straws and petals and bottle tops. The Bowerbird’s recycling and repurposing seemed like the perfect metaphor for Green Changemakers co-curating a Hub – even in the same colour palette, more or less!

We realised that what we wanted the Hub to be was that wonderful little curated bookshop or record store that we love to visit on holiday or at a weekend, where there’s always something new to discover. I’m thinking Typewronger Books in Edinburgh or Gatefield Sounds in Whitstable. An art gallery of a Hub. Where we can find the basics – policies, strategies, key thinkpieces – flavoured with special exhibitions, half-forgotten gems, eye-catching images, engaging podcasts, thought-provoking videos.

Our Metaverse Learning colleagues (shout out to James Pallister) were superbly understanding in enabling a change of contract, so that we could shift direction. They and MXReality offered to train us for free, once the Hub was launched, so that we can regularly refresh and update the Hub’s contents. So that visitors can download or bookmark resources for themselves, then return to find not the same thing but something new.

We stopped trying to be across it all.

We want a forever Hub and that’s why our launch is a soft launch. We’re inviting Green Changemakers and friends of the Hub to see where we’re at, the vision and philosophy of the Hub and how it can best be used, to support green transitions.

There will be more public events after Easter. But maybe it will always be a ‘soft’ launch, because the Hub will change as the rapidly changing landscape evolves, new approaches come into focus, and our practice becomes more mature.

But for now, the Bowerbirds rest and gather their potentia, ready to build new bowers in this beautiful space we have co-created.