Our Green School

At Hook Infant School, we are constantly looking at how we can change our school environment to benefit our children, the Hook community, local wildlife and ultimately our planet. We have partnered up with a range of organisations to help us on our journey and encourage our children, parents and village community to join us as well.

The organisations we are working with include:

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust with Wilder Schools
Surfers Against Sewage with Plastic Free Schools
Woodland Trust with the Green Tree Award
Hook Parish Council
Hart District Council
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Amphibian and Reptile Group
Lets Go Zero

In April 2022 the Department for Education introduced their 'Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy for the Education and Children's Services systems. Luckily we had already been looking at reducing our carbon footprint, reducing single use plastics and enhancing our grounds for wildlife and outdoor education, so were able to adapt our existing practices fairly easily. These include:

The Green Team

A staff team that plan our strategic direction to increase outdoor learning experiences and opportunities within the school. This includes adopting national initiatives such as the Department for Education's "Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems".

School Council

Set up to allow the 'ideal opportunity for pupils to get more involved in the way a school is run' (Save the children, 1999). The School Council play a pivotal role as part of our Green School, both strategically and practically. When we were writing our climate action plan, the School Council chose the priority targets for the school to action and they conduct surveys and audits to measure our progress.

Trailblazer

Our outdoor learning provision, a mix of curriculum lessons linked to the outdoors and hands on activities to encourage motivation and engagement. Staff have been trained to deliver a range of lessons using our outdoor areas.

Young Watchers

At the beginning of each new school year, one child from each Year 1 and Year 2 class are nominated by their classmates to be their representative as a Young Watcher. The children are active in supporting tasks to help keep our school safe. This includes checking the playground equipment is safe, as well as checking the gates, fences and hedges are all secure. Our Young Watchers are active in encouraging a litter free environment around our school.

Wild Things

Our school wildlife club. This group performs surveys, habitat creation and often helps with maintaining areas used for outdoor learning activities.

Enhancing our grounds for wildlife and education

Use the interactive map below to explore our wildlife habitats that we use for outdoor learning opportunities, such as biodiversity and habitats, knowledge and understanding of our local environment, climate education, etc. We will also include actions from our Climate Action Plan as we progress as well.

We will be adding more text and photos to the icons and areas shortly.

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Department for Education's Sustainability and climate change strategy

In April 2022, the Department for Education (DfE) unveiled its strategy to help the UK’s education sector achieve net zero targets, outlined in its policy paper "Sustainability and Climate Change: A strategy for the education and children’s services systems." Two key targets for all schools in 2025 is to assign a "Sustainability Lead" to guide the school's implementation of the strategy and to create a Climate Action Plan. To meet these initial targets, Mr West is now our Sustainability Lead and we have recently produced our Climate Action Plan, which you can find on the Policies section of our website

The strategy focuses on the following areas

1. decarbonisation, for example calculating and taking actions to reduce carbon emissions, such as becoming more energy efficient.

2. adaptation and resilience, such as taking actions to reduce the risk of flooding and overheating

3. biodiversity, enhancing the school grounds for wildlife

4. climate education and green careers, introducing more learning opportunities around natural history and outdoor sciences