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Emerging teachers undergoing initial teacher education programmes and given the opportunity to engage in a teaching placement in special provisions settings consistently report that they find the experience transformative. Over eight years, informal and often unprompted data emerged which ‘insisted’ upon reporting and suggested that the special school placement was transformative and differed in some significant features from other placements. There are themes of emerging teachers’ confidence in their ability to include, awareness of and changes to attitudes towards inclusion, creative teaching methods (including altered approaches towards differentiation) and child‐centred approaches contrasted with what was perceived to be a more restrictive mainstream curriculum. Alterations could be argued to include changes at the level of identity, attitude and in the acquisition of skills. Arguments are presented for the inclusion of such a placement as a required element within initial teacher education.

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For a few decades, due to the dynamic growth of the world population and the accelerated pace of economic growth, we have observed an increased exploitation of the environment and the resultant increasing scale of environmental threats. These phenomena, in turn, have-with some delay-resulted in social changes: people, more and more aware of the relationships between business activities, the state of environment and the quality of life, have begun to expect enterprises to introduce new management modes that would take into account the limitations and needs of the natural environment (Kuna-Marszałek 2011). Consequently, business management systems are more often preoccupied with environmental protection issues, alongside their usual production, financial and marketing goals. These pro-environment activities, integrated with other tasks and functions performed within a company, have a considerable impact on companies' performance and development outlook (Kuna-Marszałek, Marszałek 2011). Environmentally responsible enterprises may count on measurable benefits from the adoption of such strategies, even if interweaving environmental issues with their business activity is neither easy nor inexpensive. This is because such activities imply the use of appropriate tools and legal solutions, one of them being the introduction of the environmental management system (EMS).