Category: Case studies

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‘You have to dedicate time to sustainability. Decide what you want to achieve and stick to it.’

Kevin Elliott is the business manager for Meadowhead School in Sheffield. We talked to him about how he’s implementing sustainability into the school structure.

Can you give us some background on your school?

We’re a secondary school with a sixth form college, based in south Sheffield. It’s a mixed urban area, with half of the feeders from wealthy areas and half from probably some of the most deprived areas in the UK. We have over 1,900 students, 36% of which are pupil premium.

We’re also a PFI [Private Finance Initiative] school, so we ultimately hire the school’s facilities — we’re not responsible for them, which affects a lot of things that come with a sustainability plan, especially around grounds maintenance.

What climate-related responsibilities do you have?

I’m tasked by the governing body to monitor sustainability and to try and implement it into the school structure.

We wrote a sustainability policy for the school, and then we developed an action plan, and the action plan is run by an eco-group. The eco-group is run as an after-school club by two teachers from geography. They developed the action plan with the students and the students now work through it to see what we can do to become more sustainable. My role is to oversee that.

How did you develop your sustainability policy?

I was asked by the governors to develop a sustainability policy. I’d been to a South Yorkshire business leaders meeting, and they had someone there who was talking about sustainability in schools, and I took back a lot of what he was saying. We also bought a book about sustainability in the school place, and that helped us develop the policy and the action plan.

Why is sustainability important to your school?

I think sustainability is just becoming more and more prevalent in the daily life of everybody, and we thought we should get on board now rather than later.

I know a lot of secondary schools are not getting on board with it. I often go to sustainability meetings and there are no secondary schools there, they’re all primary. I don’t know if it’s because the children are older and they don’t want to be digging or messing in gardens. But we’ve got a group of eco kids that want to improve the area and want to improve society. All we can do is do the best we can for the school.

Have you had any sustainability training?

I’ve never had any training. It’s just been from attending events like the ones run by the local universities. And I’ve been in touch with local eco groups like Wild Sheffield.

What are some of the activities you have undertaken at your school?

We’ve built a forest school, and we’ve put in a huge outdoor classroom. We are growing our own vegetables, and we want some bees up there. The kids are asking for chickens too. They want an urban farm.

Our action plan covers lots of different areas. The eco group presents ideas to us and I take them to the governing body. We’ve got biodiversity, so the team has recently made a load of bird feeders in ADT woodwork. They’re now talking about building a pond.

We’re looking at getting better lighting with automatic turn-off, and we have energy-saving weeks where we have campaigns to encourage students to think about turning computers off.

We use the outdoor classroom and fundraising to support the local community. We work with the catering company around Fairtrade products and reducing food waste. We’ve done litter picks and we encourage everybody to learn about what bins to use. We’re rewilding the school grounds, for example with nature hotels.

For staff, we encourage the cycle to work scheme, and we’re reducing paper by banning printing things out for meetings. And we managed to get grants to install four charging points in the car park, which has encouraged a number of staff to get electric cars.

I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved in such a short timescale.

What benefits have you seen from these projects?

The charging points have been really useful because I’ve seen people charge their cars and that does provide us with an income. The litter picking obviously makes a difference. You can see it when it’s done.

We’ve seen big benefits from the forest area we’ve developed. We’ve just started running Forest School again for some of our SEND students who are really struggling. The outdoor classroom is a great help to them.

What barriers have you faced?

The PFI is a barrier because we can’t always do what we want to do. For anything to do with the grounds, we can’t just go and implement changes. We have to work with the PFI provider Kier, and there’s a lot of planning that has to go into it. For example, we just built some new steps to the outdoor classroom and it’s taken us a good six months to get them agreed.

One thing we’ve been working on for a couple of years is the traffic outside of school and trying to get some zebra crossings to slow the traffic down and remove some of the traffic. We’ve been working with the council for about two years now and hopefully a new traffic reduction scheme will be installed this summer.

How do you overcome these barriers?

Working with people. We work with Kier, we work with the council, we work with all parties to try and get the best outcomes for the students, for the school and the community.

I’ve also been working with a couple of primary schools in Sheffield. One of the barriers is that there’s hardly any secondary schools doing it. I’d love to link up with a secondary school that’s doing similar things, to share best practices and ideas really.

What projects have worked best?

The forest schools worked really well because of the people that have been involved. We were lucky to get some professional training on outdoor learning. And the teaching assistants were keen to be involved in it and they’ve now taken it on as their project.

The electric charging units have worked well because I’ve got staff that were travelling quite a long way in an electric car and panicking about getting home. But now they don’t need to worry because they can charge the cars while they’re teaching.

From a staff wellbeing point of view, I bought a proper coffee machine for the staff room, and now we’re using the leftover coffee grinds in compost for our vegetable growing and some of the kids are making candles from them too.

Do you think your approach would work in other schools?

I think it would. You’ve got to have somebody that will give some time to it, to attend meetings, create an eco-group, come up with an action plan. In the very busy environment that the schools are, sometimes it just doesn’t get thought about, but I don’t see why you couldn’t replicate it in most schools, because it is becoming more and more prevalent. But you have to dedicate time to it.

You have to pick and choose what you want to achieve, and then when you’ve achieved that, pick another thing and try and achieve that — rather than trying to spin all these plates and achieving nothing. I think that’s been our biggest learning.

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‘When you make it part of the curriculum it becomes truly embedded in the school.’

Stephanie Holden is a Year 6 teacher and Eco-Schools lead at Lydgate Junior School in Sheffield. We talked to her about how she is introducing and embedding climate and sustainability education at her school.

Can you give some background on your school?

We’re a junior school, so year 3 upwards. We have about 480 pupils, 120 a year. I guess it’s a fairly affluent area, but we do have a very high number of EAL [English as an additional language] children as well.

We have two school yards and then we’ve got a Forest Schools area. And we do have quite a bit of green space dotted around, where we do gardening — we’ve planted apple trees and plum trees.

How did your interest in teaching more about climate change and sustainability begin?

We’re a Rights Respecting School [part of a UNICEF scheme]. Part of that is getting the children to be global citizens. When we started working towards gold accreditation I realised that we weren’t really doing enough about climate change and the environment. So I started the Eco Club.

Why do you see climate education as important?

I think it’s twofold, really. It’s personal, but it’s also the children. There are a lot of children that are interested in climate education, and I felt like we weren’t doing enough as a school, so that was my drive for doing more.

I’m not trained in any way in climate education: I am learning with the children. We’re trying to increase the children’s understanding but also our understanding as adults as well.

What kind of training would be useful to you?

I guess the science behind everything. Although on the surface I understand it, it’s putting all the pieces together. It’s not just physical resources, it’s about getting the people to lead us. After all, we’re not experts in environmental science, we are primary teachers.

Tell us about the Eco Club that you set up.

It’s been running for three years. We opened it up to any child in years 4, 5 and 6 and they became part of the committee. It’s an afterschool club as opposed to in the school day, so the idea is that they’re ambassadors for the school, but they’ve chosen to come along to the club.

We started by becoming an Eco-School, so we followed their seven-step plan and got that last year. The three main areas covered were biodiversity, waste and energy. The children have done assemblies to spread the word across the school.

On top of that, I introduced the new role of eco-lead to our school council. We meet every two to three weeks, and they bring up any eco issues as part of that.

Do you include Forest Schools in your curriculum?

Some year groups are receiving Forest School lessons by a trained Forest School person. Our year group currently isn’t at the moment, but we’ll take them in the woods and we do things related to the curriculum. We try to get in the woods as often as possible, but realistically it’s probably twice every half term.

How do you choose what climate and sustainability activities to do?

I think it’s about having more of an understanding of being a global citizen, and preparing them for the future. I enjoy seeing the children get excited about being outside. Last week at Eco Club the kids all wanted to come outside so we spent 45 minutes raking up leaves, and they had a great time doing it. Sometimes, you just have to go with the children and their interests.

Some of the children come in with ideas about what we could do in Eco Club. They’re at the stage where they’re really inquisitive and interested, and actually what’s great is that they’re also teaching us as adults.

We’ve had a focus on waste, we’ve run bring-and-buy sales at Christmas, and then we had a massive influx of apples and plums that we’d planted a couple of years ago and we sold those at the school gates. It’s about trying to spread the word amongst the adults through our actions.

Have you found any barriers that have stopped you from doing what you want in school?

The main thing is time and also communication, because it’s quite a big school. Sometimes, with everything else going on in the school, the eco side of things can get pushed to one side and other things take priority, like curriculums and Year 6 SATS.

Everyone sees it as important, but when you juggle so many things as a school it can be hard to make it a priority.

How can you overcome these barriers?

I think when you make it part of the curriculum then it becomes truly embedded in the school. For example, in year four they do the Amazon rainforest and they talk about deforestation. And in year five they do a whole project on water, and as part of that they learn how some people don’t have access to clean water and how that links to the environment.

As part of our Rights Respecting School, we always have a summer campaign, and we’ve done things like reducing traffic around the school, using less plastic, and raising money for endangered animals.

Making it part of what we do means it’s not an add-on. It’s the world’s largest lesson, because it’s embedding things in what we already do as a school.

How do you ensure that it is embedded across the school?

We work as a team and we share ideas, so it’s not down to one person. All staff are part of being a Rights Respecting School, so it’s their responsibility to make sure that children’s rights are being met — and they’ve got to understand what that means.

We’re taking it slowly because we don’t want our sustainability not to be sustainable. We’re not trying to introduce too many things at once. I think that slow progress is probably better than trying to do everything at once and then failing. I do think it’s a whole staff approach, particularly teaching staff.

Do you think the approaches that you’ve used in school would work in all schools?

I think a lot of things we do would work at any school, particularly if they’re a Rights Respecting School because they can link it very much to that ethos. In terms of things that we’ve done like selling second-hand stuff, any school could do that.

Why do you think your climate projects have been successful?

I think when everybody gets behind something, it’s successful. When we do campaigns as a whole school, we all push for it and it can be quite exciting — one of our campaigns on plastics ended up being in the local news.

In terms of gardening at school and things like biodiversity, you can see that the children just love it. And I think the fact that they love it makes it work. Seeing things grow, digging up potatoes, tomatoes and all those sorts of things — they just get a lot out of it themselves, and that’s lovely to see.