2020-2021

Our Eco-Councillors have been working hard to achieve our three main initiatives for this academic year. They are:

• Providing a meat free day in our Orchard Bistro. 
• Significantly reducing our paper usage in school.
• Providing more plants for general well being.

Meat Free Day

We have met with Mrs Jones and she has allowed us to introduce a Meat-Free Day every Tuesday on our Topical Tuesday to raise awareness for why reducing our meat intake can help the environment. Year 6 pupils designed some of the meat free menu and the Eco-Council designed 2 meals too. Meat-Free Tuesday will happen every Tuesday in the second half of the summer term!

Reducing Paper Usage in School

We are aware that we will always be using paper in school but we realised that every week we give out Homework to every child on an A4 sheet of paper. With nearly 300 pupils in the school we realised that if we sent the homework out via email or uploaded it to the website we could save 300 pieces of paper each week/fortnight. We have asked Mrs Robinson and she agreed that after May half term we will upload the homework pages to the school website and not print them out. Let's save some trees!

Providing More Plants in our School Grounds

This is a target we will continue to work on throughout the summer term. Many year groups have a Science unit around plants and we are going to ask if teachers can include some planting in the school grounds with their children when learning about plants in Science. We think we need some more wooden plants. Phase 2 have some lovely news ones that Mr Mac built so we are going to spend the second half of the summer term planning where else we could build planters in the school grounds. 

2019-2020

Throughout the academic year we continued to work hard to ensure that we meet all of the criteria for an Eco-School. We used our action plan to make sure that the school uses less electricity, less single use plastic and more Fairtrade products in the kitchen. On the 26th January 2020 the Eco-School assessment took place. The Eco-Council talked to the assessor about everything that we were doing at our school, they also gave the assessor a tour of our school and spoke confidently about everything on our action plan. We are proud to announce that we successfully completed our sixth Eco-School assessment and achieved our Green Flag by demonstrating that we all care about our Earth. We have now proudly raised our new Eco-Flag  and look forward to keeping up the excellent work. 

Actions from the Eco-Council 2019-2020

• We built bug apartments in The Nook.
• We spoke to the premises team staff about building a bird hide in Crescent Corner.
• We encouraged more  Fairtrade products within Orchard Bistro. 
• We consulted the Thermal Imaging Report commissioned by the school that took place in September 2019 and although the heating performance of the school is 60% less than other typical schools, we still want to reduce the amount of electricity we use. 
• Eco-Councillors and other pupils and staff ensured that lights were dimmed or turned off when not being used.
• Eco-Councillors and other pupils and staff ensured all other electrical equipment was switched off when not being used.