“Since being awarded the grant, our caretaker has worked tirelessly to build a run that will house up to 8 chickens. The children identified a charity that they would like to support and rehome the hens from and we have worked together, with the children, to design the run so that it is big enough for the children to move around inside with the hens safely.

The children have applied to be ‘chicken monitors’ and have voted to call the new hen home ‘Peckingham Palace’. Our Parochial hens have moved in and are already laying eggs which are placed in our school food pantry which is used by our community.”

When we received the eco grant, our school saw an opportunity not only to address the issue of food waste, but also to create a space that would serve multiple purposes; environmental education, wellbeing and community connection.

We are using the funding to develop an area of our school grounds into a multi-functional school allotment, complete with composting system to reduce food waste and a remembrance and sensory garden to promote wellbeing and inclusivity.

Our project is on “Climate education focused on sustainable lifestyles. We chose this focus as one of targets on our school’s strategic plan was becoming a greener and more sustainable school and one way we wanted to transform our school was through the curriculum we were offering to our children.

We felt that whilst children were aware of how to recycle and make an effort to walk to school, we weren’t explicitly teaching them about climate change across different contexts and getting them engaged in climate work through a range of lessons.

At St Michael’s, sustainability and climate awareness are at the heart of our vision for education. We believe children learn best through active participation, and our goal is to empower pupils to become future custodians of the environment. To achieve this, we developed The Green Learning Hub and Outdoor Classroom a dedicated space that combines hands-on climate education with wellbeing and community involvement.

The project is still in progress, but several key milestones have already been achieved. Gardening days with families have prepared the space, planting is underway, and the final touches are being added before the official opening. Already, the project has sparked excitement across the school and the local community.

Our school composting project is off to a great start!

We now have our Ridan Composter set up and ready to use. We’ve also had a delivery of wood chips to help the composting process.

To make things easier, we’ve bought a wheelbarrow and aprons for our amazing Green Heroes, who will help run the project.

We’ve started a weekly rota to collect food waste from one part of the school. This means we can turn our food scraps into compost and help the environment!

We wanted to increase the amount of advertising that we have to promote Our Eco Refill shop and encourage further sales, to reduce waste. We enlisted the help of a marketing specialist who came in and talked to the children about ways to try and increase sales. We are now diversifying the range of products we sell.

Our gazebo means that we can run the shop in all weather and don’t have to hide under a shelter. We use our chalkboard to not only show prices but also give inspiring messages about how to save the planet. We have worked in collaboration with our site management team to create a sustainability plan and we will be working together on how we can increase the level of dry-mixed recycling we have at school, rather than general waste.

We set out to capitalise on our children’s passion for Climate Change by giving them the resources and green skills to actively become ‘Agents of Change.’

We wanted to raise awareness of the amount of food waste we had in school and encourage them to come up with ideas to help reduce this and ultimately change the behaviour in regards to food consumption throughout our school and in the community. We also want to encourage children to pursue more sustainable, healthy options of food as well as becoming aware of how to grow these.