Eco Schools

The Eco Schools Programme

Eco-Schools is an international award programme that guides schools on their sustainable journey, providing a simple framework to help make sustainability an integral part of school life. Eco-Schools can help enhance the curriculum and get the whole school united behind something important. Currently Parkland is a Silver Award Eco-School and this Year we are starting our quest to get a Green Flag Award.

Eco-Schools creates green behaviours in young people and those connected to them so that good habits learned in schools are followed through into homes and communities.

What’s more, by addressing environmental issues in school and reducing waste, we’ll save money, which can be reinvested elsewhere.

The following is taken from the Eco-Schools Website, where more information can be found on how we can all do our bit, at home, at work and of course, at school.

Benefits of Joining Eco-Schools Include:

Enhances the curriculum
Links to the community
School improvements
Saving money
Recognition and publicity

What Do Eco Schools Do?

Once registered, schools follow a simple seven-step process which helps them to address a variety of environmental themes, ranging from litter and waste to healthy living and biodiversity.View all nine Eco-Schools topics.

Pupils are the driving force behind Eco-Schools – they form and lead an Eco-Committee and help to carry out an audit to assess the environmental performance of the school. In conjunction with the rest of the school and the wider community, it’s the pupils that decide the environmental themes they want to address and how they’re going to do it.

Measuring and monitoring is an integral part of the Eco-Schools programme, providing schools with all the evidence they need to showcase their environmental success. In fact, Eco-Schools can fit into virtually all aspects of the curriculum and help to make learning, both inside and outside the classroom, fun and engaging.

Schools work towards gaining one of three internationally recognised awards – Bronze, Silver and the Green Flag award, which symbolises excellence in the field of environmental activity. Bronze and Silver are both self accredited through this website and Green Flag is externally assessed by Keep Britain Tidy volunteers.

Undertaking the Eco-Schools programme is a long term journey and it can take time for schools to implement the different elements of the framework and engage their staff, students and community with it. We think it’s a journey well worth taking though and the Eco-Schools team, along with a whole host of materials, information and resources, will be there to support schools along the way.

Who Can Take Part?

Any school can join the Eco-Schools programme, whether they’re a nursery, primary school, secondary school, college, or a school with special status. Joining the Eco-Schools programme is completely free and is designed to be flexible to make tackling sustainable issues manageable and easy for any school.