Eco

Our Vision: Making peace with nature

Intent - What does Eco look like at Sandcross?

At Sandcross Primary School, we encourage all children to develop an awareness of environmental topics in the classroom that can impact our world. We provide children with an opportunity to take leadership of environmental issues in our school and local community. We are currently working towards becoming  a certified Eco School.  The Eco Schools programme allows schools to embark on a path towards improving both the environment in both school and the local community while at the same time having a positive impact on the lives of pupils, their families and school staff.  Our aim is to use the schools 6 drivers of Diversity, Oneness, Adaptation, Cycles, Health and Interdependence to encourage the children to explore the need to care both for our world and the local community in which we live.

Our Eco curriculum is designed to challenge, develop and nurture the “Whole Child‟ with a mission of “Inspiring Lifelong Success‟. 

Implementation - So, how are we going to deliver this? 

We have set a goal to achieve and sustain the 'Bronze Level Eco Schools’' award. To achieve this, it is essential for our pupils and Eco Coordinator to complete the Eco School seven steps framework. The Eco Schools seven steps is a series of measures to help schools maximise the success of their Eco Schools ambitions. To become a successful Eco School, the first step is to elect an effective Eco Committee, which will be delivered as part of our weekly Pupil Parliament meetings and through an after school Eco Club. The active involvement of all staff and pupils is vital in the programme.

We encourage our pupils to take active leadership in the changes that they want to make within our school community. We will complete an environmental review to assess and evaluate our schools sustainability. Our environmental review will allow our pupils to generate an idea of what our school needs to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly.  After completing our environmental review, our Pupil Parliament will create an action plan which is used to identify priority elements that need to be developed within our school. We will use this action plan to generate key targets that can be tackled throughout the school year. To ensure that sustainability is truly integrated into our curriculum, it is important that environmental issues are taught throughout our foundation subjects, interwoven through our topics within each year group.

The six principles which drive our Sandcross curriculum have clear links to the Eco school topics.  Examples of how each year group have included these in their topics for this academic year include:

EYFS - Animals/Adventures (cycles)

Year 1 - Cycles of life (cycles)

Year 2 - Walk on the Wild side - Protecting endangered wildlife (interdependence)

Year 3 - Scrap Heap: How to reduce, reuse and recycle waste products (cycles)

Year 4 - Explorers: Water sustainability, the water cycle, deforestation (diversity)

Year 5 - Survivor: Survival techniques using eco-friendly resources found on a desert island (diversity)

Year 6 - World War II - Rationing, Make do and mend, dig for victory (oneness) 

Impact - What difference is this curriculum making to our children? 

The children and staff will be able to support our community in being more eco-friendly and contributing to an increasingly sustainable way of living.  Pupil Parliament will raise the awareness of various Eco topics and events throughout the year, such as through the celebration of Earth Day in the Spring term. They will present and feedback in class forums and assemblies on issues they have been monitoring. Pupil Parliament  will organise rotas for daily litter picking, classroom recycling and for monitoring taps and electrical items being switched off when they are not needed. They will promote the need to recycle lunch waste items and use the compost bins for food waste and assist the School office with their termly surveys to monitor and evaluate how many people were coming to school in an environmentally friendly way.   As a result, this will encourage all children and staff to be more aware of the need to reduce, reuse and recycle, as a means to protect the environment.  Gardening club will assist with the maintenance of the school grounds and the continued development of a vegetable patch, where produce can be grown and used in cookery sessions and to promote sustainability.   All classes would have the opportunity to be involved in taking care of the vegetable patches and flower beds. 

The staff and parents of Sandcross Primary School are keen to educate the children and each other on how we can be a more environmentally friendly community and our awareness is increasing. Where possible, staff will incorporate Eco lessons into their topics and the children will be able to discuss these topics outside of lessons.