We received fantastic news that our Eco Schools Green Flag award has been renewed for another year, acknowledging that South Hunsley has been recognised as having an excellent commitment to the national programme and driving an environmentally conscious message throughout the school.

Speaking of the achievement, the assessor gave the following feedback:

It’s wonderful that you have appointed such a representative Eco-Committee, this shows your school’s excellent commitment to both the programme and the eco-cause. It’s great to see that you had such a group of eager, enthusiastic volunteers. It was also wonderful to see that they were supported by no less than four members of staff and that a key member of the SLT was deeply involved.

It was wonderful to see how completing your Environmental Review helped to raise the level of awareness in your school and helped your Eco-Committee to identify the issues and spot gaps in your school’s existing environmental activity. It was also brilliant to read that the Environmental Review helped your pupils appreciate everything that your school is already doing to benefit our environment and identify areas to work on in the future. It was great to see how you carefully considered findings from your Environmental Review and factored them into the creation of your Action Plan. A great sign of critical thinking! Your Action Plan shows that your Eco-Committee have carefully considered how they can involve their entire school in their planned Eco-Schools’ activities to achieve maximum impacts and raise awareness amongst their school community.

We love the range of activities that you and your Eco-Committee planned for delivery. The fact that they cover both indoor (an anti-fast fashion campaign) and outdoor (litter-picks, planting wildflowers, building bird boxes and bug hotels) activities is excellent. It was also great to see accountability and monitoring and evaluation clearly marked in your Action Plan. Great work!

Your Curriculum Link examples are imaginative, practical and fun, making environmental education accessible and engaging, well done! We’re really impressed at how you’ve linked environmental issues to a variety of curriculum areas. We loved seeing the excellent photos of pupil’s work and of them enjoying their activities. This is a great example of layering in sustainability and climate change into your studies. We loved reading about how you had incorporated learning about global issues not only into the Geography and Science Curriculum (most common ones) in your school, but also into other areas such as MFL. Great work! A challenge for next year might be expanding this to incorporate these issues into other areas of learning like English, Maths, Art or D&T!

Your Eco-Board is great. Your board is incredibly visual and engaging and promotes your work in a very attractive way. We loved hearing how active your Eco-Committee was in communicating their activities school-wide with both assembly and class feedback and use of posters, the school newsletter, website and social media as well as the Eco-board itself. These all combine to make a great approach! We love that your pupils have taken their great work beyond the school gates and into their local community with your excellent tree planting scheme at Melton Quarry, where we were delighted to hear you had planted a fantastic 360 trees – superb! We are also certain that your pupils will have greatly benefitted from your involvement with such outside organisations as this, and your companion Hunsley Primary School.

The parent quote is a great testament to the work that you are doing with your Eco-Committee, that they are taking their Eco-Schools work home with them and getting their families on board is something to be proud of! Your Eco-Code is really smart and concise. It’s a great message and its punchy nature will definitely help it be processed by everyone passing by your Eco-Board.

I hope you and your Eco-Committee take great pride in your achievements, when listed it’s surprising how many there are – however, the improvements to your school environment with the lovely range of biodiversity initiatives and, most of all, your fantastic tree-planting at the quarry (we loved that) all nicely stand out!

Congratulations to everyone for the great work you have managed to do, earning your Green Flag with Merit in style. You should all be very proud of your work and the application you have submitted!