The Environment

 

We aim to teach all of our children to understand, appreciate and protect the environment

around us, and we have a lively and enthusiastic ‘Otley Solution Squad’ to help us! Read

about their activities below.

 

 

Otley Solution Squad

 

Since 2016 our Eco Council has been merged with our School Council to make ‘The Otley Solution Squad'. Our current squad members are:

 

Year 6 – Bea

Year 5 – Toby

Year 4 – Will

Year 3 – Fedra

Year 2 – Jake

Year 1 – Jo

 

We use the Eco Schools framework to support and guide our mission. Eco-Schools is an international award programme that is helping us on our journey to help make sustainability an integral part of our school life. We will address 9 areas:

 

• Energy

• Water

• Biodiversity

• School grounds

• Healthy living

• Transport

• Litter

• Waste

• Global citizenship

 

Our Eco Committee are currently auditing and reviewing our current practices in waste and biodiversity. So far we have found out that we need to recycle more efficiently. To support this class 3 visited the Masons Recycling Facility to find out more about why we should recycle and what we should be recycling. New recycling bins have been approved by the Eco committee and will be in school soon.

 

We will recycle paper, plastic, cardboard and metal. In addition the Eco committee has raised awareness that we also recycle batteries and ink cartridges.

 

We also have a collection twice a year for unwanted textiles. We send them to charity and receive vouchers back which we use to purchase new science and PE resources.

 

We ran a whole school ‘Brilliant Biodiversity day’ in September 2014. The whole school worked together to survey and record the biodiversity in our schools grounds, investigate feeding relationships and build a bug hotel to encourage more invertebrates into our school grounds and kick start further food chains. We are very proud of our new bug hotel.

 

We have also be given a fabulous bird feeding station to encourage more biodiversity.

 

We are delighted to announce that we have achieved the Eco Schools Silver Award.

 

This is recognition of our progress towards making our school more sustainable and bringing about behaviour change in young people, and those connected to them, so

that good habits learned in schools are followed through into homes and communities.

 

Currently we are working hard to increase the wildlife features in our school grounds.

We are making an extension to the bug hotel, increasing the number of bird feeders

and bird houses, building recycled bird baths and creating habitat piles and hedgehog houses. Watch this space to see how we are making our school a haven for wildlife!

 

We are very proud of the efforts of our Eco committee so far and look forward achievements.