Teach Sustainability Through an Accounting Question You Already Set

Take a question you already set. Does a technically correct answer also explain who bears the cost, over what period, and with what missing information?

SAICA's guide, Embedding Sustainability as a Mindset: Building Sustainability into Accounting Education Practice, invites educators to make those judgements visible within existing accounting teaching. The starting point is the question you teach, rather than another topic squeezed into the syllabus.

What the guidance asks

The 2026 guide argues that sustainability is already embedded in SAICA's CA of the Future Competency Framework: explicitly in professional values, attitudes and acumens, and implicitly in technical competencies (pp. 32–33).

Its assessment guidance calls for tasks that expose trade-offs across stakeholders and time horizons, using incomplete or imperfect information (p. 35). That gives lecturers a way to examine professional judgement alongside a calculation.

It does not expect students or educators to master every emerging sustainability framework. Entry-level professionals need a sustainability mindset, rather than specialist expertise (pp. 244–245). The guide is not prescriptive, and lecturers need not use every section (p. vi).

What that means for a module

The guide's four parts cover concepts, teaching, assessment and a worked case. It describes itself as a companion for educators, rather than a textbook, syllabus or question bank (p. 4). A lecturer can therefore start with a relevant section instead of treating the whole document as additional course content.

Our editorial application is to retain a familiar accounting task and examine the justification around it. The assessment principles discussed in Issue 01 offer a separate way to review the resulting task and marking criteria.

Limits and context

This is professional guidance, not a study of whether its approach improves learning. It was written by volunteer contributors (p. vii), and its disclaimer says their views may not reflect SAICA's official position. Yet the closing section, by SAICA's Mandi Olivier, says the guide "aligns fully with SAICA's strategic direction" (p. 244). The guide also assumes working knowledge of King V (p. vi).

Evidence strength: professional-body guidance, not research evidence. It reports what SAICA's guidance recommends, in its own terms, without testing whether that works.