Eco-Schools 'Green Flag'
Eco-Schools is an international award programme that guides schools on their sustainable journey, providing a simple framework to help make sustainability an integral part of school life. Eco-Schools can help enhance the curriculum and get the whole school united behind something important.
Our school’s Eco-Schools’ Green Flag (‘Gold Award’) recognises our school community’s work to make our school sustainable and to bring about behaviour change in young people and those connected to them so that good habits learned in schools are followed through into homes and communities.
Click here to find out more about Eco-Schools.
Active Travel
Promoting and encouraging active and sustainable travel is an important feature of the school’s provision, both as part of its Green Flag and climate awareness and in order to help make the school environment a safer and happier place for the whole school community.
The school summarises the benefits of active travel (walk, wheel, scoot, cycle and Park & Stride) to its young pupils through explaining that ‘travelling using our arms and legs’ is great because:
- It keeps us healthy (using our arms and legs to move is a good type of exercise)
- It keeps our environment (‘the plants and animals around us’) healthy (less vehicle fumes = better air quality)
- It keeps us happy (we can chat, meet friends, call in to play in the park, etc)
The school works closely with its City Council Active Travel Officer in order to maintain and further improve its provision (recently installing increased adult and pupil bike and scooter storage on site for example), regularly champions community sustainable travel events (eg. Living Streets’ Walk to School Week) and is a ModeShift Stars Active Travel Accredited Setting (click here to see our 'Good Travel Plan' accreditation!).
Please click here in order to view the school’s latest Park & Stride 5 min Walking Bubble Guide.
Public transport information: the school is served through two main bus routes:
- Route 52: alight on Manchester Road at Crosspool, and then walk 5 minutes up Lydgate Lane.
- Route 51: alight at The Grindstone Pub on Crookes Road, and then then walk 15 minutes up Lydgate Lane
Food For Life
Food for Life brings schools and their surrounding communities together around the core ethos of healthy, tasty and sustainable food. The programme is about more than just food on the plate; it considers where food comes from and how it’s grown, cooked and experienced.
Our school’s FFL Silver Award recognises our commitment to grow our own food (recently enhanced through link activities with a local National Trust allotment); to organise trips to farms; to source food from local producers; to set up school farmers’ markets; to hold community food events; to provide cooking and growing clubs for pupils and their families; to serve freshly prepared, well-sourced meals and provide an attractive dining environment so lunchtimes are a positive feature of the school day.
A good food culture is about understanding how food is grown, learning about sustainability, making connections with health and the impact we make on the environment, and caring about what we eat and how it is produced or reared. The more we understand about where our food comes from, how we farm and process it, how we cook and eat it, the more we can build a good food culture, and educate future generations to respect our food, our health and our wider environment.
Click here to find out more about Food for Life.
"Food for Life is doing an amazing job making sure that no kid leaves school unable to cook and unsure where their food comes from" - Jamie Oliver (Chef & Campaigner)