Paving the Way for a Greener Future: D’Eyncourt’s Eco-Schools Success

After the great success of achieving the Eco-Schools Award last year, we are already on the path of achieving the award for the second year running. Our Eco-Committee meet regularly to think of ways to care for the environment and the world around us. Our pupils in the Eco-Committee are passionate about ways in which they can make a difference, and they continue help us to maintain our Eco-Schools Green Flag Award. We are very proud of our work within school and the local community that has helped us to develop our Eco-Schools Committee.

The Eco-Schools Green Flag is an internationally recognised award for excellence in environmental action and learning. The children in our Eco-Committee are able to showcase their fantastic work during the application process and this is then assessed by the Eco-schools’ assessors.

Here at D’Eyncourt we are inclusive of all our children, so our Eco-Committee is made up of children from all year groups from Reception all the way up to Year 6. This allows for the older children to help support our younger children and develop their confidence and independence. As well as our older children developing their skills of nurturing and leadership.

We advertise the opportunity to be a part of the Eco-Committee to the whole school and we did extremely well this year as we received over 50 applications, off the children, to be a part of our committee, it was extremely difficult to pick only 16. But it is wonderful to see so many children, here at D’Eyncourt, be inspired to make a change to improve our environment.   

So far, we have planned our aims and objectives for the year, and we have already set these into motion by taking part in this years ‘Cut Your Carbon’ campaign. Where the children had the challenge to try and reduce the amount of carbon they were using at home, in the month of November, by completing the following 6 simple tasks:

• By ditching the drive and trying to complete 5 miles of travel by foot, bike, or scooter.
• By going plant based for just one day in the month.
• By turning down the thermostat by 1°.
• By trying not to buy anything new for one month.
• By having a 4-minute shower instead of a bath.
• By turning off any electronics for an hour and having a no power hour.

We had a very successful outcome with over 130 of our children taking part at home, trying to complete some or even all 6 tasks, which is absolutely incredible. The Eco-Committee were very impressed with how many children got involved to make a change for the better.Our Eco-Committee are now very eager to complete the next steps of our action plan, making those small steps of change for a cleaner, brighter future.