UNE Business School submitted its latest UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) Sharing Information on Progress report at the end of April. Since becoming a signatory in 2009, we have submitted a progress report every 18 months discussing how we are engaging in educating students to be future generators of sustainable value for business and our broader society to work for an inclusive and sustainable global economy; how our research and engagement with industry and broader community  contributes to that end and how we are embedding sustainable practices at UNE.  

In 2017, PRME’s tenth anniversary year, PRME announced that its focus was on embedding the Sustainable Development Goals to 2030 in business curricula.

In 2018 UNE Business School is working towards ensuring the SDGs are addressed in the core units of our undergraduate awards and that they are assessed in at least one of the core units. We will then move on to the postgraduate awards.

Our approach is to weave the SDGs through the content of the units to demonstrate how they are relevant to particular topics, to explore how they can be enacted and how they relate to each other. For example, MM200 Managing People and Organisations is a core unit for two of our flagship undergraduate degrees, the Bachelor of Business and the Bachelor of Agribusiness as well as being an elective across several interdisciplinary degrees. The unit material will address the SDG’s across all relevant topic areas and form part of the core narrative that managing means managing responsibly. A responsible manager can ensure they are attending to all relevant human and ecological considerations by drawing on the SDG’s as part of normal management practice. The SDG’s will form part of the assessment for the unit.

Dr Theresa Smith-Ruig will incorporate SDG’s into her Human Resource Management unit. In particular, she will draw on material related to SDG5 on Diversity and SDG3 on Good health and well-being, connecting them with the relevant concepts in her teaching materials in order to demonstrate the relevance of those SDG’s for human resource managers. Other colleagues are working to weave the SDG’s into the relevant parts of their unit content.

Read the full report via the UN PRME web.