Schools spend around £106m a year on water. A large secondary school can spend as much as £20,000. Careful water management together with an effective education programme can reduce water use by two-thirds. This could save a school of 600 pupils around £5,000 every year.

Schools can reduce their water consumption by assessing how much they use every day and by looking at the size of their meter, identifying leaks and drips, adapting the flow rate on taps and reducing the amount of water used in toilets.

School grounds provide an ideal opportunity to introduce pupils to the natural environment and to biodiversity in a practical way. They offer a safe and potentially exciting facility for outdoor education that can complement classroom-based activities. Think about the grounds around Y Pant.

The energy required for heating, lighting and powering equipment in an ordinary school classroom releases about 4,000 kg of CO2 every year – enough to fill four hot-air balloons 10 metres in diameter. UK schools spend about £450m on energy each year, three times as much as they do on books, and about 3.5% of their budgets.

Some schools will spend four times more per pupil than similar schools in the same region. The difference is often to do with how effectively schools manage their energy use. Surveys show that, through simple low-cost and no-cost measures, schools can reduce their fuel bills by up to 10% while also reducing their CO2 emissions.

From October 2008 as part of the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive all state schools with a floor area of over 1000m2 are required to display a certificate which rates their energy use on a scale of A – G.

The new Display Energy Certificate (DEC) looks like the A-G rating you would expect to see when purchasing a new Fridge or Freezer. It is part of the Green Flag criteria to show the DEC. Keep an eye out for the DEC which is being sent from RCT soon.

Recent data relating to the health and health-related behaviour of schoolchildren aged 11–15 years in England and Wales found:

• One in three (33%) report feeling low each week.
• Over half of students (56%) do not meet the recommended level of physical activity for at least an hour a day, five days a week.
• Under three in ten students (27%) eat fruit or vegetables daily.
• 16% of students are smokers. Girls are more likely than boys to smoke and the prevalence of smoking increases with age so that by the age of 15, 34% of girls and 28% of boys smoke.
• One in three students (34%) have been bullied at least once in the past couple of months.

The Law says, all state-funded schools have responsibilities to make sure that their grounds are kept free of litter. Any private individual can take a school to court for having litter in its grounds. A school can be fined up to £2,500 plus a daily fine until the litter is cleared.

Most people are aware that they shouldn’t drop litter and the majority of adults feel very guilty when they do. However, research has shown that most children (particularly those aged 12+) do drop litter and are not ashamed to admit it. Children are more likely to bin their litter when in the company of their parents or teachers than when alone or with their friends. As primary school children are generally supervised quite closely, the litter problems in primary schools are often less severe than in secondary schools.

Waste or rubbish is what people throw away because they no longer need it or want it. Almost everything we do creates waste and as a society we are currently producing more waste than ever before. In the UK, we produce more than 430m tonnes of waste per year and every year this figure increases.

Back to the top