Eco-school

At Barnes, we are working hard to become a more sustainable school and take great pride in helping to protect and preserve our world.

This academic year (2020-21), we have started the journey to becoming an international, Green Flag Award Eco-School. The programme is designed to raise environmental awareness amongst young people and in England it is run by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. Internationally, the programme is the largest educational programme in the world present in nearly 70 countries with millions of children participating. Our school is now part of this global community working to create environmental change for the benefit of our children and future generations.

The programme guides schools on their sustainable journey, providing a framework to help embed key environmental issues into the heart of school life.  These include: Biodiversity, Litter, Waste Minimisation, Transport, Healthy Living, Energy, Water, School Grounds and Global Citizenship.

The scheme not only empowers pupils and raises environmental awareness, but it also combines learning and action for the improvement of the environmental performance of schools.

Schools entering the programme can gain a Bronze, Silver, and, ultimately, a Green Flag award through an assessment process.

We are pleased to announce that we have been awarded the Eco-schools Bronze and Silver awards for our achievements so far.

Our recently elected Eco-Team is made up of a group of dedicated eco-warriors from Year 5 and 6.

The Eco-Team will be organising and leading whole school initiatives for all year groups to be involved in. We believe that every child in the school has a part to play in looking after our school environment and local community.

The first step for the Eco-team is to complete an environmental audit to decide which environmental issues to focus on as a school.

Eco schools at home ideas

Newsnuggets Network is a media-literacy club and independent news site made for and by children, with the support of adult journalists and professionals.

By taking part in weekly sessions at their local school, children aged 8-14 develop into confident, rigorous, fact-checking young reporters who can contribute content to the website.

newsnuggets.co.uk/science/

• Evidence of the environmental actions worked on in our Action Plan.

Year 5 and 6 litter picker monitors!

• Examples of curriculum work linking to environmental issues.

To celebrate Waste Week, Year 5 were asked to design a dish from unwanted leftovers. When designing their dish, they were asked to think carefully about the dish’s: edibility, eco-impact, practicality and presentation. Many children chose to actually bake their dish for their families and some even entered their creation into The Pod’s ‘Great Busta Bake competition!’ Here are some of their outcomes.

To celebrate Earth Hour, the children in KS2 were asked to go for a walk in nature and use the colour wheel to find things in nature that match each other. Here are some of their outcomes.

Children across the school celebrated World Children’s Day by comparing and contrasting their lives with the lives of children from around the world. 

In conjunction with their Geography work on ‘India’, Year 5 children were asked to answer the following questions in a creative way:
What do we mean by the word ‘climate’? Why is the climate changing?

Here are some of their outcomes.

Planting sunflowers with the Eco Team