SUStAiNABiLity

yI am incredibly lucky to have been given the responsibility to lead Sustainability at Cranleigh and over the last year have been trying to learn how we can be as effective and empowered as possible, both as individuals and as a community, in addressing this most crucial of agendas.

We started with House Sustainability Strategies and a really strong push on waste and rubbish, and asking every subject to “ green season ” their curriculum to acknowledge climate change wherever possible. A great opportunity to contextualise this had also appeared on the horizon in the guise of COP26.

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Head of Sustain Mr abilit Phil Leamon y and Environmental Education abil Cranleigh School At Cranleigh, we marked this with a collaboration with all four Cranleigh Schools to explore the importance of COP and how we may rise to the challenges it sets. Another way we prepared for COP26 was through the United Kingdom Schools Sustainability Network (UKSSN), of which Cranleigh is a member school and I am the staff lead for the Surrey Area.We took 20 students from around the country and I am really proud to say that, as a result of our efforts at COP26, the UKSSN has been directly involved in the development of the DfE’ s new Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy.

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The Sustainability Council has been busy with a raft of initiatives to drive us forwards and re-engage us with the planet that sustains and supports us all. First, we moved from a Meat Free Monday to a Meat Free ‘One Day ’ strategy, with plant-based meals being spread over a week.The intention here is to reduce the one day ‘hit’ and to reflect the type of lifestyle that will be more common in the future.The end of Lent term also heralded Eco Week which was, like its first instalment last year, an incredibly positive and busy event.

We had a whole week of: nature walks; star-gazing; environmental-themed lessons; seed-planting; talks for guest speakers; creative and essay competitions; PSHE sessions on the Sustainable Development Goals; eco film-screenings; Eco chapel; an air-quality testing event with CPS; and a fantastic UKSSN / SEAS meeting seminar on featuring such eminent speakers as Caroline Hickman, Helen Forester, Force of Nature and Dr Dan O’Hare from the British Psychological Society.

After Christmas we started to offer

‘Teracycle ’ recycling – various forms of flexible plastic – in School. Another collaboration going strongly is the outdoor work we are doing in the community – our vegetable garden in the Medical Centre Garden continues to thrive and be great fun but we also take pupils most weeks to our three local community sites where we plant, tidy and maintain.This year we embarked upon our first ever Outdoor Curricular Learning Week.The Eco Council set out 20 different sites around the amazing resource that is Cranleigh’ s outdoor space and asked teachers to take as many classes as they could outside to teach a curriculum lesson that otherwise would have been delivered in the classroom.

I saw a huge range of lessons being taught, from mathematics calculating the flight of paper aeroplanes, to creative poetry classes, to geography surveys to art classes to music inspiration – it was incredibly inspiring and we are working to develop some of our spaces to be more usable as teaching environments all year round.The positive effects on young people of engaging with nature and learning outside are clear and our grounds are too good a resource to not use. We ’ ve just begun a more strategic approach to Sustainability and Environmental Education after a year of experimenting and engagement. Amongst other things, setting up a Sustainability Committee to draw on the experience, energy and knowledge of pupils, staff, governors, parents and OCs to consult on and shape strategy to help us achieve well-defined operational sustainability goals.We have much to do in the future, to ensure that the horizon in front of us is seen for exactly what it is – somewhere we will arrive at soon enough and something for which we must be ready.