Spotlight on the School Nurse

DEDICATION TO SUSTAINABILITY

The GDST are aiming to reduce their carbon emissions by 42% by 2030, and they hope that this reduction is as close to 100% as humanly possible by 2050. In the Academic Year of 2021/2022, the GDST proudly became Carbon Neutral. The big goal is to become carbon positive by 2050.

NHSG are very proud to be a part of this movement towards sustainability, and we know that we can make a big difference. The three main focuses for our school, particularly this year, are recycling, education/ awareness, and energy usage. To help us achieve this, we have created pupil leadership roles by introducing our Sustainability Group. These girls work alongside staff to educate and engage others, and to raise awareness of how we can individually take responsibility for climate change and work collectively towards a more sustainable future. We want to lead by example within the local community, ensuring that at school we are taking all possible steps to reducing our impact on the environment.

What we achieved in the academic year 2021-2022

It was a busy year building foundations for our future plans. We joined a GDST group of sustainability leaders to work together as a family of schools. We also had the honour of working with University College London (UCL) on a Case Study to research the variation of secondary schools’ engagement with climate change and sustainability education in England. Education is the best way to raise awareness and bring about change, and so we are grateful we were able to be a part of this Case Study.

In the Summer Term we held our first annual ‘Touch of Green Week’ with great success. Staff, parents, and pupils were encouraged to use public transport, walk, or cycle to school where possible. Our Go Green Group led a litter picking trip around our local area every lunchtime, and everyone in School was encouraged to monitor their energy usage throughout the week. We also held a food waste competition between the four Houses to see which House collected the least food waste over the week. It proved very effective in getting our community thinking about all our choices and actions, and how every little bit adds up to having a big impact, both positive and negative. After extensive consultation, we also introduced ‘Meatless Wednesdays’ at NHSG, with the help of our great catering team at Holroyd Howe. This has enabled us to help reduce oil, water and land resources used in the food industry for meat production, and therefore we have saved a lot of pollution as a result.

Another positive impact we had last year was that some pupils also had the brilliant opportunity to attend a Youth Climate Summit in Newcastle where they were able to discuss how we can tackle climate change on a local level.

What’s coming up for 2022-2023

As we are now well underway with the new academic year, we have set out an ambitious set of sustainability goals for school. Here are our aims for this year:

1. To establish sustainability subgroups in the School Forum to focus on important sustainability issues and expand our Sustainability Group so more girls are involved at Senior School.

2. Introduce Eco reps at Junior School to enthuse girls from an early stage.

3. Finalise the NHSG School Sustainability Policy.

4. Improve recycling through recycling stations on every floor of the School. 5. Continue to reduce food waste through the half-termly House food waste challenge.

6. Reduce use of paper, particularly printing and photocopying.

7. Plan a second annual “Touch of Green Week”.

8. Promote confidence in riding a bike with Junior School pupils.

9. Introduce a PSHE module for Year 8 on sustainability to continue to raise awareness through education.

10. Introduce a trial meat-free day at Junior school after the success at Senior School.

11. Take part in the Junior school GDST Film competition for Sustainability focusing on how to promote awareness. 12. Introduce a carbon offsetting option for parents to contribute towards for School trips.

We can already see our sustainability efforts from last year are having a positive impact on the school community: we have reduced photocopying from 224,844 copies over one half-term (September to October 2022) to 146,059 for the same period this year, and by introducing Meatless Wednesdays in March, we estimate we have saved about 5000-10000kg of CO2.

We look forward to seeing how far we’ve come one year from now, as we continue to work towards becoming a more green and sustainable community.