Eco School / Outdoor Learning
Eco Schools and the Green Curriculum at Christ Church CE VA Primary School
‘Together, with God’s love, we can achieve anything’
Intent
Eco-Schools is a global programme engaging 19.5 million children across 67 countries, making it the largest educational programme on the planet. For nearly 25 years Eco-Schools has been empowering children to drive change and improve their environmental awareness through the simple Seven-Step framework in order to achieve the international Eco-Schools Green Flag award. The seven steps are
Form an eco-committee,
Carry out an environmental review,
Write an action plan,
Find curriculum links,
Inform and involve,
Monitor and evaluate
Create an Eco Code.
At Christ Church we have achieved the Bronze and Silver Eco Awards and we are currently renewing our Green status Green Flag Award. Eco-Schools develops pupils’ skills, raises environmental awareness, improves the school environment and creates financial savings for schools as well as a whole host of other benefits.
The aim of Eco Schools is to make the children, staff and community of Christ Church CE Primary School aware of the ten Eco Schools topics. These topics are Marine, Biodiversity, Litter, Waste, Energy, Transport, Water, School Grounds, Healthy Living and Global Citizenship. To renew our Green status we have to concentrate particularly on five of these areas. They are Litter, Biodiversity, Transport, School Grounds and Water. We still imbed and link the other Eco topics into our curriculum.
We intend also that our children will develop and employ business skills by working with our staff to produce a costed Class plan for growing plants, selling them and deciding what should be done with any profits made. This links to our mathematics curriculum and complements our PHSE curriculum.
Detail
The National Curriculum and the EYFS curriculum link well with delivering sustainability education and have clear links to Eco Schools topics.
The Eco Team / ‘Garden Gang’ raise awareness of various Eco topics throughout the year. They regularly meet, run their own noticeboard and have produced an Action Plan to address the identified issues.
They share these priorities, and actions we all can take, with the School via assemblies and addresses.
For specifics of food / flowers growing and the business element, we employ a specialist teacher (p/time) with a remit of working with each class to work out a plan for growing and selling plants, and investing any profits raised on a class-by-class basis. The growing plan is attached below. Because growing food is a seasonally-dependent operation, whilst links are made with other subject topics studied at opportune times of the year, stand-alone sessions are also undertaken.
Impact
The progress of each class’ food-growing business plan is displayed on the Green Curriculum noticeboard in school.
The staff and parents of our School are keen to educate the children and each other on how we can be a more environmentally community and our awareness is increasing.
On our webpage you can find some ideas for Parents and Carers to work with your children on seasonal growing tasks. This is attached if you would like to have a look at some of the ideas you could do with your children outside of school.
ChristChurch has the privilege of working closely with Michael Mullan as part of our 'Growing Curriculum'. Around the school you can see the benefits of his work in the form of our gorgeous planters filled with flowering plants and often fruits. There are often lovely plants available to buy under the shelter. Towards the field you can see the ground where the children work with Mr Mullan to grow fruits and vegetables. The pupils also benefit in terms of their business and enterprise skills through considering: the budget to buy plants; how well they will grow; how popular the plants will be with customers and how much they should price them at.
