VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM supply by looking into lower carbon options.
How do you encourage staff to embody sustainable practices?
We encourage daily behavioural changes to make a real difference, and it is understood that small adjustments could result in a 10% reduction in our school’s overall energy bills. So, we are empowering all our staff with knowledge and best practice examples on managing classroom temperatures, including remembering to close windows, knowing how to adjust the radiator temperature, drinking more water for warmer days and wearing more layers for colder weather. When done regularly, these small actions can help to reduce the school’s overall environmental footprint.
Your school has implemented a new digital system to tackle transport emissions. How has that been going?
Our schools are based at the heart of the bustling city of Cambridge, which experiences frequent road congestion. Following a successful trial last year, our school partnered with innovative shared transport provider Kura to provide safer, greener, smarter school travel for our students in Cambridge and the surrounding areas. Our school community now benefits from a fully managed school transport service which aims to ultimately reduce the number of cars travelling to and from the school in the city centre, by providing reliable, safe, and easily accessible bus travel for our students. We are also exploring solutions that can be put in place to assist parents in connecting with other parents to share the school run, encourage more active travel to and from school, and ultimately reduce the number of vehicles driving to our school sites each day.
A joint desire to tackle the global issue of climate change has also brought us together with other independent schools within Cambridge to address travel-related emissions. We are excited by this opportunity to work with our neighbouring schools to address common problems, demonstrating to our students and stakeholders that collaboration is essential to addressing the complex effects of climate change that our students will face in their future.
How else does the school ensure sustainable operations?
As curriculums are continuously updated, we
often find ourselves in a position where some of our textbooks no longer meet the specifications of a curriculum. Rather than recycling these books, we prefer to partner with charities such as Books2Africa to reuse our materials and in places that need it most.
Looking to our sustainable food and drink provision, our school caterers support our environmental goals by collecting and recording our daily food waste. By monitoring food production, spoilage and plate waste, we are able to continually monitor where we are accumulating the highest food waste to continually reduce our wastage. Our school canteen also strives to serve more vegetables, higher welfare meat, fish and dairy products to reduce our overall impact on the environment.
Tell us about how the school has embedded sustainability into its educational provision. To truly prepare our students for a more sustainable future, we believe that sustainability must be woven into the curriculum and that students must understand the positive impact that their actions can have on the world they live in. Through both formal and informal learning activities, we have created an environment whereby students do not view sustainability as a separate issue, but an issue woven into every strand of their learning.
With all the changes we are implementing to
reduce our environmental footprint as a school, we endeavour to bring these real-world examples of science, engineering, and behavioural change to address sustainability issues in the classroom. For example, when our students are studying the thermal conductivity of materials, our teachers will reference the recent improvements to our own buildings (such as upgrading to double glazing windows) to bring the theory to life in science lessons. Our students also learn how we as a school use graphs to assist in illustrating the patterns and anomalies in our heating demand to identify areas where we can make changes to reduce our environmental footprint – providing practical examples of how maths can be used to solve real-world problems.
All our pupils have access to outdoor learning enrichment opportunities through our Forest School programme, which immerses children in nature on a regular basis, encouraging them to create a strong long-term connection with the natural world. From meeting wildlife and identifying trees, Forest School is integral to our curriculum, helping our students to learn about the natural environment and using their own initiative to solve problems.
For our older students, we welcome engaging guest speakers such as Chartered Environmentalists, offering students an insight into careers within sustainability and how it covers much more than just Geography. Many of our students engage with the Student Sustainability Committee, which empowers them to investigate issues at school related to sustainability.
What’s next for the school?
As our Sustainability Strategy is implemented across Stephen Perse Schools, we are continually looking at how best to manage the balance between efficiency and our impact on the climate. Through embedding sustainability into the ethos of our school, we will equip students for a future where they are actively able to support the UN Sustainability Goals. We hope that by sharing our motivations and work in sustainability, we can inspire other schools to take the plunge and consider how they can positively impact the environment in their setting with the resources that are available to them.
https://www.stephenperse.com/ January 2024
www.education-today.co.uk 23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
