Sustainability

How is Dukes implementing sustainability?

Governance

It includes addressing pressing matters such as the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, marine pollution, unemployment, and inequality. The lower the priority society places on addressing these matters, the greater both the compounded effect on the inability of the environment to continue to provide services that support life and the cost implication of righting affect we are having on future generations.

Education has a pivotal role in enabling a mindset that:

Truly understands the interconnectivity between human society and the negative impacts it creates on the environment through pollution and over consumption, and societal progress through lack of education, inequality and exploitation

Innovates and takes action to put right negative impacts and enhance the capability of the environment and human society

Dukes is passionate about sustainability; it is a key aspect of our value to lead from the heart, and it will be a golden thread across the group. We have implemented a new quarterly reporting process so the Board has greater oversight of sustainability performance.

A new policy has been adopted which commits us to achieving Net Zero ahead of 2050 and adopting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) by incorporating them into our plans.

After our colleges successfully achieving Planet Mark Certification in 2022, we have set ourselves a challenging target of achieving Planet Mark Certification across all of our settings by the end of 2023.

Operations

Our case studies are examples of our sustainability work in 2022 and showcase the breadth and depth of the sustainability agenda.

Our Colleges

During 2022, our five colleges all achieved Planet Mark certification.

They also took part in Dukes Sustainable Career Weeks which raises awareness of the types of jobs that are included in the growing field of sustainability. In addition to hearing from industry experts in after-college lectures, 54 of them attended The Engineering Design Institute and built scooters out of waste paper, which they then test drove.

Our Nurseries

Many people feel that nursery aged children are too young to understand about the natural world, but at Miss Daisy’s that is exactly what they learn about as the curriculum is designed to include lessons on all of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals from inequality and intergenerational learning to pollution. The children are Ambassadors and have their say on what is important and what different topics mean to them.

Both Miss Daisy’s and Eaton House Nursery have a focus on waste and recycling and zero food waste. At Eaton House Nursery, the children even shout out ‘zero waste’ if they finish all their food as a way of celebrating their achievement.

Sustainability Curriculum And Sancton Wood

Many of our nurseries, schools and colleges include sustainability in curriculum to create awareness of the challenges we face, like waste and recycling, inequality, food waste, air pollution and energy efficiency.

At Sancton Wood, the curriculum is citizen-based and includes human rights, wellness, diversity, equity, work-life balance, empowerment and the value of community engagement, philanthropy and volunteerism. Following an application for solar photovoltaics, the children are also experiencing the application process from start to installation.

Eco Champions

Our children are involved in sustainability as members of our Eco or Citizen Councils and Sustainability or Eco Committees. From our nurseries to colleges more than nine of these pupil bodies decide which aspects of sustainability they want including in the programme for the year which they help implement.

In 2023, a staff Champions Network will be established to provide support in implementing sustainability plans through engagement with our children and collaboration with colleagues.

A shared folder of resources is in development to support this with aligned staff learning and development opportunities and communication briefs.

Our 2022 Sustainability Award Winner

Eaton Square Preparatory School won the company sustainability award this year. They were awarded the Eco Schools Green Flag in July 2022 and have an active eco-committee with children helping to drive the agenda. Our two staff champions have continued to work with our children and colleagues to actively change practices within the school to make the school increasingly more sustainable. Programmes this year have included waste and recycling, zero waste food, an innovative 10-point energy plan to improve energy efficiency, a trashion show to highlight fashion’s environmental impacts, a gardening club and an active travel plan that involved talking to Mums for Lungs and the local authority.

Devonshire House

Our sustainability champion at Devonshire House has delivered some outstanding work this year with the pupil Ambassadors. This has included raising awareness through visiting a Veolia material recycling facility and buying a Terracycle bin for waste crisp packets as part of a drive to both produce less and recycle more wastes.

The air pollution station sited outside the school has been used by the Ambassadors to support active travel and reduce idling of cars dropping off and collecting children, which led to the school receiving a TfL STARS Gold award.

So empowered, one of the children even wrote a passionate letter asking for a dripping tap to be fixed to reduce water loss including a calculation of how much water was being lost as part of his persuasive writing.

Community Work And Partnerships

Recognising we cannot make the transition to low carbon on our own, last year our children took an active role in their communities by talking to local environmental groups and campaigners about air pollution, climate change and waste. They engaged with local authorities and MPs to gain support in creating positive change and wrote to inspiring people to encourage them to come into our schools to share their thoughts with our children.

Knightsbridge School decided to rid itself of plastic glitter and repurposed this using a local plastic recycling specialist, whilst Earlscliffe switched its cleaning products and introduced new bins to better support waste segregation for recycling, and the Lyceum introduced meat-free Mondays with its catering provider.

Learning And Development

This year we are creating a curriculum and non-curriculum education programme for our children using a catalogue of resources that we are compiling appropriate to each age group. In addition, we are developing internal and external learning and development opportunities for our staff. Through these separate but aligned programmes, we will deliver learning, growth and development opportunities plus the necessary wherewithal to take action and create innovative solutions to the economic, social, technological and cultural challenges that threaten to imbalance the earth’s ecosystem.

UNSDGS – GRAND THEMES

The adoption of the UNSDGs has culminated in creating four grand themes for the education programme which are described below and depict the UNSDGs that they cover:

1. GOOD HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

2. RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION

3. PARTNERSHIPS

With more than 10% of Generation Z likely to live to 100 years and beyond, yet if current projections are correct, for much of those additional years, people will be living with illhealth. To avert this, it’s vital that we support our children, to develop and maintain the necessary skills, knowledge and resilience to achieve success in a future world.

Our programme will cover:

Nutrition, food and food waste

Stress and anxiety management

Neurodiversity

Clean water and sanitation

Labour standards, poverty and economic growth

A net-zero world cannot have wastage and wastes like we have today. Producing what is needed must have a lighter touch on the environment and consuming products needs to be consciously managed to avoid waste and where possible put materials back into a production cycle through closed loop material chains or a circular economy approach.

Responsible consumption and production thus includes topics such as:

Specification and procurement

Energy selection and efficiency

Climate and climate change

Water use, pollution and aquatic life

Land use, pollution and terrestrial life

Recognising we cannot achieve sustainability on our own, it is fundamental that our behaviours are collaborative and that this leads to shared actions, goals and effective outcomes.

Our work on Partnerships includes:

The meaning of partnership and collaboration

Types of partners

Relationship building for equality, peace and justice

Achieving sustainable cities

Innovation

4. CHARITABLE GIVING

Dukes Foundation is the main way we will deliver on this key theme. Our membership of the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) will enable our board of trustees to remain at the forefront of excellent practice in how we manage our charitable work.

Performance

In 2022, we achieved Planet Mark certification across our colleges. This equates to a total of 801.1 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent emissions or 2.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per employee, as verified by Planet Mark.

We are developing the metrics we will report in next year’s Annual Report. This will include carbon footprint data that has been verified by Planet Mark as part of the certification process across all our settings in 2023 and progress against our grand themes and plans.

Accreditation With Planetmark

Through PlanetMark, Dukes is protecting an area of endangered rainforest thanks to Cool Earth; a charity working alongside rainforest communities to halt deforestation. Our pledge through Cool Earth goes directly towards supporting the Asháninka community in Central Peru.

We are also helping the Eden Project – an educational charity building connections with each other and the living world, exploring how we can work together towards a better future.

FUTURE TARGET FOR ALL SCHOOLS:

Reduce carbon footprint by 5% annually

As part of the PlanetMark certification, Dukes Education has committed to making a year-on-year reduction.