Education for sustainability (EfS) has been rapidly growing in New Zealand schools, bringing with it an interest in whole-school approaches to develop EfS and a focus on action competence as a means to understand student learning in this field. It is currently UNESCO’s decade of education for sustainable development, which calls for “a new vision of education that seeks to empower people of all ages to assume responsibility for creating a sustainable future” (UNESCO, 2002). Education for sustainability (EfS) fits with such a vision in that it expands on environmental education to include social, economic, political and cultural perspectives, as well as a focus on global equity in the use