In this second special episode guest hosted by our Head of Impact, Steve Watters, he talks to Adam Flint and Louise Robson-Turner to explore what it actually takes to shift behaviour inside complex, time-poor institutions, what businesses can learn from schools, and why better design is usually more powerful than louder messaging.
Adam Flint is Education Manager at Keep Britain Tidy, overseeing the delivery of EcoSchools in England. He spent 14 years at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester designing learning experiences and then led MADE, Manchester’s cultural education partnership.
Louise Robson-Turner is a Project Manager in Keep Britain Tidy’s EcoSchools team, joining the Count Your Carbon project shortly after launch.
Together, they were central to developing Count Your Carbon, the first free full-scope carbon calculator built specifically for schools, aligned to the global greenhouse gas protocol and designed to support action, not just reporting. The tool recently won gold for Game-Changing Innovation of the Year at the Global Good Awards.
In this conversation, you’ll hear about:
- What 14 years of designing learning at the Science Museum Group taught Adam about how behaviour actually changes, and why incremental, relatable encounters with ideas matter more than big announcements
- Why the Department for Education’s 2022 requirement for schools to have climate action plans and sustainability leads created a gap that no existing tool was filling, and how Count Your Carbon was built to fill it
- Finding a proportionate effective approach – why Count Your Carbon asks for enough data to produce a confident footprint estimate but not so much that it becomes an unreasonable burden, and what 18 months of development with dozens of school collaborators revealed about that balance
- What the national benchmarking data across the English schools estate actually showed: student and staff commuting combined as one of the biggest emission areas, food as a major factor in primary schools, and energy as the third most significant category
- Why many schools focus heavily on waste and recycling but those actions have a relatively small impact on their carbon footprint compared to food choices and travel, and what full-scope measurement makes visible
- How the tool was designed to feel like an empowerment tool rather than a compliance exercise, and why the framing centres on tracking progress rather than measuring how well or badly a school is doing
- What Keep Britain Tidy has learned about the gap between policy ambition and school capacity, and why money, time, expertise and an aging school estate are structural problems that no tool alone can solve
- The two steps Adam recommends for any organisation wanting to move from intention to measurable change: build a cross-functional sustainability team first, then benchmark
- Why over 5,000 schools have registered since launch, what is driving that uptake, and what the data from two full academic years will start to reveal about long-term impact
- What gives Adam the most optimism: school senior leadership teams and local authority leads taking direct action now, not the expectation that young people will fix it later
Key takeaway
Count Your Carbon is an example of how to solve using a suitable approach and tool to estimate carbon emissions. The challenge was never whether schools cared. It was that the tools available were either too simple, too expensive, or built for businesses.
Adam and Louise’s argument, shaped by backgrounds in arts and cultural education rather than sustainability consultancy, is that behaviour change starts with removing friction and building confidence, not simply raising awareness. The schools using the tool are not waiting for permission or perfection. They are starting where they can, measuring what they can see, and building from there. That is the only sequence that works.
Find out how to enter the Global Good Awards 2026.
Want more practical ideas on ESG and purposeful leadership?
Follow Life Matters More and never miss an episode.
Subscribe here to listen on your favourite podcast platform.
The following podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.