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Writer's picturePaul Browning (Development Team)

Congratulations to Stepney Primary School - Eco Schools Green Flag Award

Congratulations to Stepney Primary School on gaining their Eco Schools Green Flag award.

This is what the Eco Schools Assessors had to say

"Fantastic work Miss Baitson & Stepney Primary School!

We are very pleased to tell you that you and your Eco-Committee at Stepney Primary School have been successful in meeting the requirements for the Eco-Schools Green Flag Award.

We reviewed your application and noted the following:

It's wonderful that you have appointed such a representative Eco-Committee, this shows your school’s excellent commitment to both the programme and the eco-cause. We love your democratic and fair approach to appointing Eco-Committee members. It’s great to see that other pupils played a part in the process.

It was also wonderful to see that they were supported by two members of staff and that key members of the SLT were deeply involved. We love that you kept minutes from your meetings and that they helped to track, guide and prompt your activity, and thank you for including the excellent example. It was great to see that young people were responsible for completing those meeting minutes – this helps them develop new skills! This is a mature and professional approach. Great work!

It was wonderful to see how completing your Environmental Review helped to raise the level of awareness in your school and helped your Eco-Committee to identify the issues and spot gaps in your school's existing environmental activity. It was also brilliant to read that the Environmental Review helped your pupils appreciate everything that your school is already doing to benefit our environment and identify areas to work on in the future. It was great to see how you carefully considered findings from your Environmental Review and factored them into the creation of your Action Plan. A great sign of critical thinking!

We love your ambition in tackling areas where you scored lowest in the Environmental Review. This shows you have a confident Eco-Committee dedicated to maximising their impacts.

Your Action Plan shows that your Eco-Committee have carefully considered how they can involve their entire school in their planned Eco-Schools’ activities to achieve maximum impacts and raise awareness amongst their school community. We love the range of activities that you and your Eco-Committee planned for delivery. The fact that they cover both indoor (energy monitors and a ‘switch-off’ campaign with posters, reducing food waste and single-use plastics, promoting re-usable bottles, providing plants in every classroom and installing LED’s) and outdoor (building bug hotels, bird boxes and feeders, and planting trees in your orchard) activities is excellent. It was also great to see accountability and a monitoring scheme clearly marked in your Action Plan, although we were surprised there was no Evaluation system in place. Great work though! Your Curriculum Link examples are imaginative, practical and fun, making environmental education accessible and engaging, well done!

We’re really impressed at how you’ve linked environmental issues to a variety of curriculum areas. We loved seeing the great examples of your ‘Jigsaw’ lesson planners and photos of your pupil’s excellent work (superb DIY bird feeders). This is a great example of layering in sustainability and climate change into your studies.

We loved reading about how you had incorporated learning about global issues not only into the Geography and Science Curriculum (most common ones) in your school, but also into other areas such as English (loved the ‘Speech to Humanity’). Great work!

A challenge for next year might be expanding this to incorporate these issues into other areas of learning like Maths, Art or D&T! Your Eco-Board is great. Your board is incredibly visual and engaging and promotes your work in a very attractive way.

We loved hearing how active your Eco-Committee was in communicating their activities school-wide with both assembly and class feedback and use of the school Arbor app and social media as well as the Eco-board itself. These all combine to make a great approach!

We love that your pupils have taken their great work beyond the school gates and into their local community by planting trees in your orchard with the help of the Humber Trust and working with Ideal Standards to gain an understanding of greener energy. We are certain that your pupils will have greatly benefitted from your involvement with such outside organisations as these, the Humber Forest and the International Pupil Council.

The parent quote is a great testament to the work that you are doing with your Eco-Committee, that they are taking their Eco-Schools work home with them and getting their families on board is something to be proud of!

Your Eco-Code is really smart and concise. It's a great message and its punchy nature will definitely help it be processed by everyone passing by your Eco-Board– and very cool to create it as an acronym of your school’s name.

I hope you and your Eco-Committee take great pride in your achievements, when listed it's surprising how many there are – however, the improvements to your school environment with the energy, waste and plastics reducing measures and, most of all, your wonderful tree planting and other biodiversity initiatives (we loved those) all nicely stand out! Congratulations to everyone for the great work you have managed to do, earning your Green Flag with style. You should all be very proud of your work and the application you have submitted!"

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