Want to Declare a School-Wide Climate Emergency?

Declaring a Climate Emergency: A Beginner’s Guide!

This decade is our make-or-break opportunity to limit warming to 1.5°C and steer the world toward a net-zero future; as educators, we play a vital role in helping to create a better, greener world. 

One way to let everybody know of your intentions to be part of the solution is to declare a Climate Emergency.  This is not as daunting as it sounds  - it's increasingly impossible for any leadership team to deny that we face a crisis, especially if that message  - with the plea for a declaration  - comes directly from pupils.  The Chase School eco group regaled our Head with impassioned speeches, petitions and home-made videos  - take a look at one example here: https://www.chase.worcs.sch.uk/about-us/climate-emergency/

ONE: Shout Out!

Once you have the go-ahead from your Headteacher, the first step is to raise awareness of your pledge across the school community.  Easy wins and instant actions include:

• Adding your climate pledge to as many places as possible: your school website, School and Department Improvement plans, posters & screens around school, bulletins & newsletters

• Share pledge with staff through briefings, emails and meetings

• Direct tutors to share with their form (to instantly reach all pupils)

• Include the pledge in your initial welcome package and training for new staff

• Add ‘contribution & implementation’ of the climate pledge to your job descriptions 

• Add ‘consider environment before printing’ message to the end of emails

TWO: In It Together.

Your second objective is to encourage accountability across the school, within departments, and within individual classrooms, encouraging the core expectation for all staff members and pupils to drive a holistic, whole-school approach to sustainability and climate education.

• Get specific actions onto your School and Department Improvement plans

• These can then become a focus for ‘learning walks’ and other accountability measures within your school.  Ideas include:

1 - RESOURCES: to reduce the amount of paper and printing within each department 

2 - GREEN LINKS: to reinforce links to sustainability, the environment, and/or the climate crisis within the existing curriculum; to adapt existing lessons and topics of work to strengthen these links; 

3 - RECYCLING: (reduce what goes into these bins first and foremost!) Do I have a recycling bin in my classroom? Do I know what can be recycled, & do I actively promote and reward the correct usage of this? 


THREE: Power Up!

Objective number three is to empower staff to act.  Ask if you can train staff on the best ways to manage resources; consider how to encourage greener classrooms; and suggest ways to infiltrate existing lessons to include links to the climate, nature & sustainability (more of this to follow!)

Other ideas include:

• Emailing staff to gauge interest for next steps  - the more support you can get, the better

• Ask if you can become Climate & Sustainability Lead (and get this formally on your email signature)

• Ensure all classrooms have a recycling crate with clear signage

• Sustainability Lead can then meet with business manager, site team, cleaning staff, resources staff (to review paper & printing usage) etc

• Get a Twitter account to help spread your good work.



See the implementation of your climate pledge as a process: plan and execute it in stages.  Creating a leadership environment and school climate that is conducive to the effective implementation of your climate pledge is central here  - adopt pester power!  People will need constant reminders to make the right choices and keep the pledge in their minds, but then these shared beliefs will quickly start to translate into the necessary behaviours and actions of people in the school community.



We declared a Climate Emergency at The Chase High School in 2019 - if you would like more information or support, please do get in touch.

Sarah Dukes is Sustainability Coordinator and English Teacher at The Chase School in Malvern; she passionately feels we must adapt our school curriculum to include explicit teaching on the climate crisis, sustainability, and nature connectedness.  Follow @ecodukes

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Embed Climate Education in English - Part 2!

Image
Use our Y oung Climate Activists Climate change, living sustainably, and connecting with our natural environment can and must become key features of our lessons, across all subjects: as the defining crisis of our time, climate change impacts everything. Use the following first as models, to identify and unpick key skills, then as inspiration to apply the skills to the pupils own work.   1.       Model writing – identify key skills 2.       Explore impact on reader 3.       Apply skills to own writing   Persuasive Super Power: Greta Thunberg   No one can deny how passionate and persuasive Greta Thunberg is. A Swedish environmental activist who is known for challenging world leaders to take immediate action for climate change mitigation, she was just 15 when she first began to skip school to protest outside parliament for more action against climate change – the same age as the pupils...
Read more

The Climate Classroom - Infiltrating MATHS!

Image
  Ideas for Infiltrating the MATHS Classroom!  We might think that only some subjects naturally lend themselves to climate education – understanding our changing climate and weather patterns in geography, for example, or learning about aspects of the climate and ecosystems in science.  But this is a world crisis that underpins everything, and as such, all subjects have a role to play. Baba Dioum, Senegalese poet and environmentalist, famously said: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.”   The subject of mathematics, developed over centuries, can be a creative and highly inter-connected branch of learning that p rovides a groundwork for understanding our beautiful world, helping pupils (and staff) to celebrate and deepen our love for nature. Is Maths Even Real? A recent TikTok video from an American high school student, showing her deliberating (whilst applying make...
Read more