St Martin’s School and Nursery Eco-council are a committee of pupils, elected by their peers to represent their Form group’s opinions and ideas of how we can become a more eco-friendly school. Our school representatives are:
EYFS – Claudia
Form 1 – Andrea
Form 2 – Azikiwe
Form 3 – Sophia T
Form 4 – Izzy
Form 5 – Yugo
Form 6 – Anthony
Mrs Harun – Parent Representative
Mrs Harun listens to the minutes from each meeting in a Teams meeting with Roshan and takes our ideas to the Governing Body.
Eco Schools Awards
We have been working on our Eco-schools awards, gaining Bronze and Silver. We are now working towards our green flag award. As well as forming the eco-committee above, there are several steps to becoming an eco-school: creating an environmental review, creating an action plan, having a code, making links to the curriculum, informing and involving the rest of the school community, monitoring and evaluating.
Environmental review
We completed our environmental review in September as we do each year. This helps us identify our actions for the year. We consider all the areas: Biodiversity, Energy, Global Citizenship, Healthy living, Litter, Marine, School Grounds, Transport, Waste and Water and how we can improve. Our review from this year can be found on the Eco-board in school.
Action Plan
We use the information from the environmental review to write an action plan. In previous years we have bought recycling bins, installed bike and scooter racks and developed road safety skills with bike-ability training and scooter training.
Last year we reduced litter in the playground with a litter-picking rota, banned single use plastic in school, purchased anti-idling signs with the Junior travel ambassadors and worked with the school council to re-design the front garden to include planting beds and areas for wildlife including insects. This is due to be installed in the Christmas holidays this academic year.
This year we have identified, in the environmental review, that we need to reduce our energy usage in school and are working on our action plan to reflect this.
Eco-Code
We decide that our eco-code or slogan would be a little more creative but still reflect our actions so we wrote it in a poem…
We are the eco council –
Here’s what’s important to us:
Our school is anti-idling,
Please, try and take the bus.
We want to grow our own food,
For a healthy eating win,
And introduce composting –
Put peelings in the bin.
We are banning single use plastic;
So teachers, please use what you have found.
We’ll put our litter in the bin,
Instead of on the ground!
Links to the curriculum
We do lots of eco-friendly work throughout school curriculum. This video shows some of our learning.
Informing and involving the school community
Each time we set a new action plan we inform the school community of our new ideas in an assembly. This is last year’s Assembly.
Monitoring and Evaluating
Last year, we needed to find out about single use plastic so we also spoke in assembly and set up a questionnaire for children to complete.