How to be a green school...

Polam Hall School's Green Flag

Schools are huge energy consumers, producers of waste, and consumers of resources. What can they do to improve this situation? In an article for the Guardian", Zac Goldsmith, former editor of The Ecologist magazine, identified several areas where children, schools and the wider community can make a significant and long term contribution to the environmental issues we face. Below we show how some girls’ schools are tackling these issues:

Good food & cooking

Everybody eats, so a change in attitudes and behaviour on food issues can have far-reaching consequences. Since schools are major consumers of food, so it follows that a change to using local sustainable produce, and Fairtrade initiatives could have a major impact.
Brighton & Hove High school have organised a number of events to raise girls’ awareness of how careful shopping can help to make a fairer world. At a big Fairtrade event girls brought in food-labels from home and discussed the food in their cupboards at home. This helped them understand the global issues surrounding the food industry. A similar project on local food produce is planned, with displays of local food producers, bakers and farmers markets so that the girls can discuss the benefits of local shopping and hopefully have a better insight into what goes into the family shopping basket.
Many schools now have active gardening clubs. At Heathfield School Pinner girls sell plants they have grown from seed in pots made from newspaper. They also grow vegetables such as tomatoes and carrots as well as a range of herbs. The school caterers have begun to compost any waste from the kitchen and this is used to feed the school’s wormery.
At Haberdashers Monmouth School for Girls, the girls are creating a community orchard to raise awareness of local food and of the need to reduce food miles. The school’s Eco-Committee will be planting the trees from September.

Growing & biodiversity

By growing and cooking food, children learn the science of how things grow as well as the practicalities of looking after themselves.
At The Red Maids School, there is a blossoming Growing Club with many girls enthusiastically weeding, sowing seeds and tidying up the greenhouse. With the help of Morrison’s ‘Let’s Grow’ vouchers, the Growing Club has purchased gardening equipment and planted strawberries, garlic, red onions and a variety of herbs as well as a bay tree. Fruit bushes and vegetables will be planted soon in a new allotment which has been fertilised with manure from a local farm.
Some schools are adopting a cross-curricular approach by designing their own Sensory Garden where pupils can explore nature through vision, touch and smell, as well as growing their own fruit and veg. Leweston school pupils achieved this with the help of staff from their local garden centre who worked collaboratively with the school. 
Brighton & Hove High School’s latest project is an apothecary’s garden, designed to link with Tudor History topics. The garden has a traditional design and layout and, where possible, uses authentic materials. The girls created red brick paths and low hand-woven willow fences around a symmetrical planting scheme. When deciding on the planting scheme girls consulted Nicholas Culpeper’s influential seventeenth-century book. Many of the plants were grown from seed and cuttings by the girls in the Gardening Club, others were sourced from a local farm shop.
One of the wider benefits of this project has been to enable the girls to make positive links between the natural world outside their classroom and their own health and well being.
The garden is deliberately positioned near to the school’s wildlife area and mini-beast mansion, as many of the herbs are also attractive to the butterflies and bees. Girls learn how nature exists in a delicate balance which is designed to safeguard us all by feeding and caring for our health.
At Farlington School a Young Enterprise group founded a company called The Lilypad Project – a not for profit company which funded the building of a jetty into the school lake to allow the younger pupils the facility to “pond dip” in safety and to provide access for the local community to join together in ecological and conservation ventures.

Energy saving

Schools are great consumers of energy, so it makes sense to implement energy reduction measures to save costs as well as save the environment. It’s a challenge that can be incorporated into the classroom with small measures like turning off the lights, recycling paper and so on… often managed by schools’ own eco-committees:
Bolton School is typical: “As part of the eco-schools initiative we have formed a Green Action team to help make a difference to the environment in our school” says Anna McCrory, Sixth Form student and Chair of the School’s newly established Green Committee. “This has resulted in a number of new schemes being set up, such as putting recycling boxes in every classroom, lights being turned off when rooms are not used and limiting paper for printers. It means that all the staff and students are actively aware and contributing to saving the planet! Electricity usage is the School’s main problem and the Green Committee is in the process of targeting this next.”

Some schools have joined forces with national initiatives such as ‘Footprint Friends’ an organisation educating young people in environmental issues. Wykeham House School girls painted their feet in support of fighting climate change, their feet representing the footprint that everyone leaves on the world. They then learned how to cut down energy use and waste and were encouraged to monitor their use of electricity at home, using energy monitors.

The girls of Sherborne School for Girls took part in the Sherborne Goes Green Environmental Sunrise Conference which saw many local groups and organisations all concerned with tackling various different environmental issues such as green waste disposal, transport, food miles and local produce, wildlife areas and recycling.

Larger energy saving projects also abound, for example, at Heathfield School Pinner, the new Sixth Form Centre has been built with the environment in mind with the installation of six solar panels on the roof, a solar recorder indicating the amount of electricity being generated and the CO2 saved by the photovoltaic installation.

Waste

We live in a throwaway society – from the countless plastic bags which take thousands of years to de-compose, through to fashion items which are hot one moment then discarded the next.
At Haberdasher’s Monmouth School for Girls, a Frock Swap was held to highlight the problems of throw-away fashion and the need to recycle and re-use clothing. Brigid Eades, Head Girl and keen environmentalist was pleased to get involved with the event. “The Frock Swap was a really good way to raise awareness of how many clothes are thrown away in the UK each year and end up in landfills. Girls from all years came to the event and enjoyed swapping their old clothes for a new outfit – to create any style! The racks were full of choice and the Frock Swap proved to be great fun.”

A staggering number of plastic bags are used and thrown away in the UK each year – on average each is used for 20 minutes, and, once discarded, will take up to 1,000 years to decompose. Children are now leading the way in demanding, and often creating re-usable bags for their own use. To raise awareness of recycling, girls at The Abbey School enjoyed environmental art workshops creating outdoor musical instruments out of recycled materials for the school’s sustainable garden and a striking fish sculpture from old CDs.

The benefits of becoming an Eco-School

As the staff and girls at Bruton School for Girls have found: “Embarking on the eco-journey is not an easy one. Commitment and hard work may come up against resistance to change. Recycling requires effort and changed habits. Waste for recycling must be stored temporarily and can look unsightly and some projects incur costs. But the rewards are great. Aside from the environmental benefits of reducing, re-using and recycling, pupils gain the opportunity to use personal, creative, mathematical and scientific skills. By adopting more sustainable practices and raising awareness of environmental issues, schools will consume less energy, water and materials. They will produce less waste and provide more efficient and healthier environments for the school community. In short the community becomes more caring not only for individuals but also for the environment.”