2021-2022

The Eco- Council have met since our return to school this year to discuss the progress of our three initiatives.  

• Meat Free Days - We feel this has been a real success! By the new initiative which was introduced last year the Eco Council feel it has given the children and adults in Barons Court a real flavour of how vegetables can be used as the basis of a meal rather than meat or meat substitutes. We have worked with groups of children throughout the school to discuss how this small change can help the environment. 
• The reduction of paper usage has been successful too! As a school we have moved to an online system, homework is no longer printed, which has saved a significant amount of paper. The reuse of ‘scrap’ paper has also been increased- with occasional printing mistakes being turned into note paper.
• Because of school closures during the previous academic year, our target of increasing plants around the grounds with a purpose of promoting well-being is still a project in progress. However, it has been agreed that over the autumn and winter, wooden planters will be built and bulbs will be planted ready for a fresh and vibrant spring! 

We have also updated the ‘Wheel of the Weekend’ for Fridays assemblies, with new tasks which focus on the concept of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The Eco Council are meeting again soon to discuss several potential new initiatives for this year. We are looking forward to sharing these with you! 

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. 

Eco School Green Flag Award

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.