At Gunthorpe Primary School we want to engage our young people in environmental education and action. With the current environmental issues, we think it is important for our school to empower the children, motivate them and give them the knowledge on how to make positive changes to provide everyone with a brighter environmental future.

We have teamed up with the Eco Schools charity, founded in 1994, which operates in 70 countries and engages 19.5 million young people globally. This makes Eco-Schools the largest educational programme on the planet. We have brought together children from across the school to meet and participate in an Eco Club to discuss topics and help to make changes across our school and local community.

Since September, we have met weekly as a group to discuss ideas and work on an environmental review of our school. This has provided us with the knowledge of where our school currently is in ten different areas and what we are already doing well and what we could work on next and improve to make us more eco-friendly and do the best we can do for the environment. Whilst completing the review, the children have had a chance to visit all classrooms, ask the children across school for their help to answer questions, ask questions to staff members, look around the school grounds and get a much better understanding of our school as a whole. From this, they have some amazing ideas for areas we can improve and actions we will add to our action plan to work in the new year.

The children in the Eco-club have also had a chance to see and understand how to compost and have helped to compost fruit and vegetables. They have spoken to their classes about recycling and they have led a session with their classes to create a promise leaf to add to a tree in our hall. The children had to write a promise to say how they could make one small change to improve their environment (Eg. I promise to walk to school more or I promise to recycle more). Eco Club were also able to go to a local area and work with a local organisation to plant some wildflower seeds. They will also be coming to work with the children at school to plant the seeds on our school site too, this helps to promote wildlife to come to our grounds!

We have lots of exciting things coming up for the Eco Club still and they are excited and ready to make important improvements to our school!