How green can we be?

SUE BIRCHALL, long-standing SBL, discusses how green schools can actually go while looking at the various initiatives her school has implemented on its journey to net zero

The green agenda for public bodies has been underway for some time now, and the pressure to become carbon neutral is something that is always on the horizon. But how much can the education system sensibly achieve?

The SBL always has best value and value for money at the heart of all that we do. Our drive to engage with this topic will no doubt in some way be influenced by the financial savings that can be made whilst making efficiencies. This is particularly true at the moment with the cost of resources at an inflation busting high.

As a school, we have already started on this journey in a very tentative way. We have an Eco Council, various wildlife initiatives, grow your own veg, a large recycling programme and various other smaller initiatives, but these are not a consolidated project. To move this forward we have completed a Wilder Kent Award application and are working with our school community to improve our approach and make it more dynamic. Recognition being a great motivator which will enforce our efforts and raise the profile to include our whole school community.

I was interested to sit in on a seminar at the recent ‘Edexec by Alex Green of the Go Zero 2030 charity. This charity, which works closely with the DfE on sustainability and climate change, supports all schools who sign up to meet their obligations as public sector bodies. Registration is free and open to all schools and is an opportunity to share good practise and your journey as well as pick up support and motivation. Needless to say, we will be joining up but back to our journey.

Our school is PFI, and our PFI provider, along with our link in the local authority, are keen to look at fuel usage and ways that all schools could make savings, both monetary and carbon usage. The school is onboard with this, and we all met to discuss first steps. The outcome of this is that we are going to hold a ‘turn it off’ week. This will involve a week where everyone is encouraged to turn off any items using power at times when they are not being used. In addition, the management company will look at streamlining the uses of power for all aspects of building management.

This will then result in a review on actual savings on our energy usage across the event which we can advertise to our school community to encourage the good practise adopted in this week to continue. Schools are busy places, and everyone has a wealth of learnt behaviours and attitudes that can prove very hard to change. Often an event has the greatest impact, albeit for a short period of time.

In an effort to inspire the changes needed, our project is going to be part led by our sixth form. They will be integral in promoting the event and encouraging the whole school to take part and as a reward will be offered a percentage of the amount saved towards

Once the event has happened the results will be measured by the management team and shared with all staff and students. Encouragement will then be given for the turn off to continue and it will be followed by further event weeks later in the year. For instance, letting them know how much was saved each day and estimating the financial savings of turning off certain items based upon their energy consumption. Thus reducing our carbon footprint.

As an aside to arranging this, we are already looking at software which turns off electrical items when not in use, concentrating on purchasing locally and plastic use reduction to make ongoing savings. I can see