Eco-Schools Green Flag Award
Congratulations on passing your Eco-Schools Green Flag!
We are very pleased to tell you that you and your Eco-Committee at The Angmering School have been awarded an Eco-Schools Green Flag.
We like your approach in appointing the Eco-Committee members to represent a wide range of year groups and staff departments. It is wonderful to hear that the children have developed their confidence and skills in leadership, critical thinking and team building! It is clear that your approach to the Eco-Committee demonstrates a proactive, inclusive and educational approach to the programme. It is impressive to see!
We also like how your Eco-Committee communicates their work in a variety of ways. For example, you communicate through Google classroom for announcements and sharing ideas. You also use assemblies and class forums. You engage external stakeholders by using your school bulletin and weekly newsletters. You also communicate through the school Facebook page and letters home to parents. This approach shows how valued and embedded the ideas underpinning the Eco-Schools programme are in your school!
It was really great to read how your Environmental Review provided the basis for the projects in your Action Plan and helped you identify the areas you need to focus on. We like that the review process made you realise you wanted to increase biodiversity and that many classrooms would benefit from plants, leading to a programme of cultivating new plants from leaves and buds. Your inclusive and educational approach to the process demonstrates a reflective and considered approach to your Eco-Schools work - this is a great skill that we can all learn from!
You’ve clearly taken great efforts to connect your Biodiversity, Waste and School Grounds projects happening across the school and embedding work into curriculum and everyday school life in a really impactful way. This is really inspiring and clever. Your Action Plan is great and we love the use of pictures! The actions that you planned out were SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound). This is important as it helps to achieve progress and empower your Eco-Committee. It was also great to see accountability, and monitoring and evaluation marked in your Action Plans and that you identify a range of creative actions. We like how your lovely Eco-Code has clear ideas and is a call for action that the whole school can get behind!
Your curriculum links were really clear and creative! For example, we like that you used active learning strategies and used a cross-curricular approach. For example, we love hearing how you developed the students’ understanding of biodiversity by using English lessons. For example you got the children to read the opening of "The Darkness Out There" by Penelope Lively, and then asked them to sketch and annotate the description of the setting, which is a meadow. After establishing that wild flowers and meadows are used in literature to create a positive atmosphere using pathetic fallacy you took them outside to your new meadow area to identify the plants and grasses and either write an atmospheric poem or opening to a short story using the names of the flowers, grasses and insects they identified! This kind of creative and practical pedagogical work hopefully helps the children to create lovely memories and approach these important topics in fresh and relevant ways, and is a great way to encourage them to take pride and ownership of their health and their local environment.
You've also clearly looked both internally and externally and engaged with a range of different stakeholders, including that your school has been involved with the RSPB bird count, WSCC recycling scheme, Terracycle, the Woodland Trust, Culberry Nursery, the Scouts, and Angmering in Bloom. It is also great to hear that you took part in an Eco conference hosted by Lancing College. This kind of work is a good example of the collaborative approach we will all need to adopt to help protect and improve our environment - your application made us feel really positive for the future!
Your achievements this year have been lovely to hear about. It is wonderful to see that your children are keen to protect the environment, and this is in large part due to the actions and attitudes of your staff in regards to setting an example in raising the importance of taking care of our planet. It is inspiring to hear about the work you have done on raising the profile of recycling. We love hearing how you addressed the litter problem and that it has made a very big difference to your school environment. All of these efforts show how embedded the values of the Eco-Schools project are within your school, well done everyone!
Congratulations to everyone for the great work you have managed to do. You should all be very proud of your amazing work and the great application you have submitted. You've really earned your Green Flag with Merit Award!
As always THANK YOU very much for your hard work, we are so proud of all our schools and the collective achievements they have made to protect our planet for future generations. We look forward to working with The Angmering School again next academic year to help you expand on your eco-actions and successes of this year.
The Eco-Schools Team
