case sTudy
“We Turned Our School Yard Into an Allotment!”
case study
St. Mark’s C E Primary School turned its tired old flower beds into thriving vegetable patches and
is now in the process of converting its school field into allotment gardens that can be tended by
pupils and the local community.
The Issue
Like many schools, St. Mark’s Primary was looking to become
more sustainable but was unsure where to begin. The school
had a few raised beds that had been left unused for years, but
the school did little to encourage pupils to find out where their
food came from or to get them involved with growing fresh fruit
and vegetables.
Glen Robinson the Headteacher said: “The school is in a
highly deprived area. Our pupils don’t naturally think of healthy
choices when planning their meals and as a result their diets are
often quite unhealthy. We wanted to raise the profile of grow-
ing our own food and this project gave pupils the opportunity
to see where their food comes from and to try some different,
healthy foods in the process.”
Getting Started
Karen Long, the Teaching Assistant responsible for leading
the gardening project at St. Mark’s began making contact with
organisations and individuals that could help, and set to work
restoring the school’s raised beds with the help of the local
community.
“The raised beds were damaged, overgrown, and it was
impossible to tell the plants from the weeds,” said Karen. “A
gardener told us that the soil was compacted because it hadn’t
been used for so long, so we put a note in the church magazine
and got members of the local community to help dig out the
beds and re-fill them with compost. It doesn’t sound like much
but it was an awful lot of hard work.”
AINABLE SCHOOLS
How it Worked
The school council, known as the ‘Eco Warriors’, oversaw the
SUST
gardening project and drew up an action plan identifying what
they wanted to achieve. The council members decided to use
the beds to grow a variety of fruit and vegetables, to appoint
water monitors to water the plants, to set up a compost bin
in the school and to apply for funding to develop the school
We turned our school yard
garden further.
The whole school got involved with the project, with pupils
into an allotment!
making decisions on which vegetables to grow, working out
which pests could be eating the crops and finding eco-friendly
ways to tackle them.
54 • School Management Today
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