Sustainability consciousness in primary schools: roles of leaders in the post/digital era

Abstract Sustainability consciousness is pivotal to ensuring sustainability in schools. However, the roles of leaders are considered critical towards ensuring sustainability consciousness. Hence, this study explores the roles of school leaders in promoting sustainability consciousness considering scholarly submissions, using the case of South Africa. Systematic review method was adopted. Thus, Google search engine was adopted, and a search was done using identified key terms on SABINET as the selected database. The retrieved literature were sieved using inclusion and exclusion criteria as required by the adopted protocol of PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses). From the analysed data, themes were generated. The findings of the study showed that educational changes are not capable of ensuring sustainability consciousness. Meanwhile, factors such as policy, curriculum and collaborative efforts are capable of hindering or promoting sustainability consciousness. Following the submission of scholars in the systematically analysed literature, the roles of leaders are put forward as recommendations towards ensuring sustainability consciousness in their various schools.