Eco Council
The Eco Council is a group of elected children from across the school. Our aim is to address environmental issues and promote sustainability by ensuring that all members of the school community reduce waste and lower energy consumption. Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Satchwell are the grown ups who work with us to help us in our eco work!
We hold regular meetings and do regular jobs in and around school. We help with litter picking around the school grounds and have helped Nunnery Wood High School to keep the surrounding area litter free. We collect fruit and vegetable waste each day in each classroom and add it to large compost bins that are on the playground and by the allotment. We have also worked with other schools in our cluster and Worcester Wildlife trust to promote biodiversity by understanding the importance of bees. Each June the whole school counts the number of bees we see around the school grounds and we record it in a huge graph, which is displayed by our ECO board. Since we started promoting bees our bee population has grown, see the picture below.
We have 75 Solar panels fitted on our roof. This helps us to reduce our electricity bill and save the planet by getting some power from the sun. We are trying to use less electricity in school too, by turning lights, projectors and screens off when they are not in use. Each year we take part in 'Switch it off fortnight' where we get the whole school involved in switching lights off and saving electricity.
With the help and generosity of our Friends Association we have built an amazing allotment that provides each class an opportunity to grow their own fruit, vegetables and flowers. We have a large poly tunnel and can extend the growing season so more exotic plants can be grown. Each class has the chance to enter our allotment competition where the tallest sunflower, largest vegetable, most attractive raised bed or best scarecrow can win the class a prize.
We have been awarded the ECO schools Green Flag. The whole school helped to achieve ECO schools status. We are now working towards renewing this award and have five areas to focus on.
Our five main areas of focus have been -
- biodiversity
- the school grounds
- healthy living
- litter
- waste
Have a look at the powerpoint, at the bottom of this page, we used in our whole school assembly, where we explained what we were working on this year. This is a picture of our ECO board. It shows the work different year groups have been doing.
We have been developing our woodland area so that all children across the school can access the woodland area and work and play outside more. Mrs. Satchwell now takes every class into woodland each fortnight.
We have been very lucky as we have had help from the Duckworth trust. They came with their volunteers and cleared two sections for us. One was an enormous area of brambles; in this area we will have some beautiful buddleia bushes, which will attract butterflies. The other area was full of long grass. This area had two large patches of dry exposed soil, which we will sow wild flower seeds in.