Throughout the year, the pupils and staff at Heatherwood School have been Eco Warriors and have achieved an Eco-Schools Green Flag with Merit! We’re very proud of the award and our pupils have worked hard to make it happen!

The main framework consists of seven elements:

1. Eco Committee
2. Environmental Review
3. Action Plan
4. Involving the whole school and wider community
5. Linking to the curriculum
6. Monitoring and evaluation
7. Eco Code

We have an active Eco Committee, including a pupil from each class and a cross-section of staff from the school. If you are a parent or local company who is interested in supporting our eco initiative, please contact our school.

The Eco Committee will meet termly to form an action plan. Our chosen topics for this year were:

1. Saving energy
2. Saving Water

We have been making sure taps, lights and whiteboards are turned off when not in use. Every class has an eco-warrior who is responsible for deciding at our council meetings what elements of school life we should try to make greener. Our Post 16 department recycles all the paper and plastic each week, and we take care of our outdoor spaces, leaving some areas to grow wild to support the bugs and bees! 

Our students have taken part in national butterfly counts, explored how we can take care of our outside environment in the wildlife and sensory gardens. 

We've also used recycled materials to create our art rather than using single-use plastics, which we loved! 

In addition to the hard work of the pupils, our eco-staff committee have worked hard to ensure that all staff are on board with our eco code, and we're doing everything we can to reduce our energy usage and single-use plastics.  

Staff Eco Group

Our staff eco group meet to share ideas to work towards a greener, more sustainable school. With the support of our Senior Leadership Team, we’ve already been able to put several small but significant projects in place. 

1. A staff eco board has been set up in the staff room with all our ideas and asking for other suggestions. It includes sections for donating or requesting items for upcycling and a sign-up sheet for carpooling.

2. Paper towels have been removed from our staff toilets, and we now use hand driers, saving the school over £500 per year and saving 190 bags of rubbish from landfill each year.

3. Everyone was excited to have more wild areas in our school grounds with native flowers to attract wildlife such as bees and butterflies. The group organised a wild flower border as well as leaving a large lawned area near the visitor car park to go wild naturally. This ties in nicely with the native hedgerow already planted there for the queen’s green canopy programme. The only way there will be to keep a natural path for pupils and staff to access and enjoy the area.

 4. Regular sharing and redistribution of school classroom resources was suggested to avoid unnecessary spending on duplicate items and to repurpose items which could be wasted or disposed of. The first of these sessions was held last term.

5. Staff have been repurposing used stationery items such as ring binders, folders and punched pockets, saving school funds and reducing items sent to landfill.

We’ve been involved in the living eggs scheme in the past and if we do this in the future the group would like to go with a project for rare breeds/wildfowl which relocates the birds to small farms/releases into the wild.

The staff eco group eco motto is –

‘We can’t change the whole world, but we can change our world’. 

 For more details please visit the Eco Schools website using the link below:

www.eco-schools.org.uk