Jubilee Eco-Warriors
At Jubilee Primary School, everyone recycles – and there’s a very good reason why!
The Eco-Warriors – initially set up for pupils with a particular interest in science – is a group of children from across the different year groups who are responsible for managing the recycling scheme for the whole school. The brain- (and love-?) child of a dedicated teacher, Jubilee Eco-Warriors are green ambassadors, learning and sharing about the environment, climate change, recycling and energy conservation.
EcoACTIVE help run workshops and do creative activities with both these and other pupils, working with the Eco-Warriors to develop green commerce in their school by making and selling items made of recycled materials and rubbish. This way they can have fun and share their message with pupils and families at school events, as well as bring a little more money to the school to support their activities.
Creating a team of green ambassadors has been a great success at Jubilee Primary School. Their enthusiasm and knowledge permeates the school, creating a great recycling and energy conservation culture amongst both staff and pupils. Maybe your school could do this too?
City Academy – becoming an Eco-school
As a relatively new school in Hackney, City Academy was keen during 2009/10 to establish itself as a great environment in which to learn – so one of its early initiatives was inevitably an Eco-committee, made up of pupils and staff, to look at the school’s footprint and the impact of its activities on the environment. And as a school designed by the architects to be as ecologically efficient as possible, they had the best possible start!
EcoACTIVE helped the Eco-committee to create and deliver a whole-school assembly on the environmental features of the school building, and we followed this up with a sequence of workshops on waste and recycling, calculating your carbon footprint, food miles, composting and action planning.
Working in collaboration with volunteers from KPMG, the pupils then ran a full environmental audit using the Eco-schools approach, and successfully gained a Bronze Award for their subsequent action plan. This focused on recycling, major works on the school allotment, a Carbon Detectives project and communicating to the school through assemblies and the use of noticeboards.
Their success has been appreciated by families and staff alike – one pupil has even set up his own wormery at home, following his work in school on composting – and their work will now provide the basis for a whole-school sustainability plan, developed and led by the pupils. And this year they are going for their Eco-schools Silver Award and Green Flag – we’ll keep our fingers crossed!
