Bewsey Lodge Primary reduce litter in their school

17 July 2012

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The project

Our school has always been almost litter free. However the Eco-team noticed a small increase in litter when we started our ‘Healthy Schools’ tuck shop as some children were dropping litter on the floor. During the next Eco-meeting the children discussed how we could resolve this problem.

The children’s aims included:

• Encourage children to stop dropping litter on the floor
• Encourage children to think about caring for our school grounds
• To reduce litter in our school grounds

Delivering the project and linking it to the curriculum

Action to date has included:

• Whole school assembly – to encourage children to stop dropping litter on the floor. Children were asked if they would like to volunteer to litter pick at dinner times
• Posters created and then displayed around the school
• Taking part in Keep Britain Tidy's ‘Love Where You Live Campaign’ (whole school involvement)
• Litter picking station – all children have the opportunity to volunteer for litter picking at dinner times
• Litter monitors (every dinner time) – monitoring how much litter is picked each week, results are logged in our eco-monitoring book

Getting the pupils involved

The children quickly took ownership of this project and began to make the decisions almost immediately. A number of different children go out in the playground everyday and litter pick. The amount of litter collected is then logged into a data chart. The data is then tallied at the end of the school week by the Eco-team litter monitors. All the data is then recorded into our Eco-schools monitoring book.

Funding

No. We had sufficient equipment in school already.

Challenges

There were a few challenges along the way, but they were soon resolved.

Encouraging children not to drop their litter:

We hosted a dedicated whole school assembly with the school Eco-team to help spread the message, ‘Love Where You Live’. This was followed by a ‘Love Where You live’ project in which each class chose an area within the schools grounds to clear/tidy. This was a huge success and all children thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Where would we store the equipment, who would litter pick and how often?

During our Eco-meetings the children thought of a number of ideas of how to solve these issues. They wanted everything to be easily accessible for all the children involved. A decision was made to introduce a litter picking station which we placed at the front entrance for easy access. During our assembly the Eco-team also asked for children to volunteer for litter picking duty each day.

Benefits of being an Eco-School

The children have learned to love our school grounds and take care of it. Our school is now cleaner and tidier than prior to undertaking the project. The children are also much more aware of the importance of not dropping litter to help keep our school and community clean and tidy.

Measuring the impact

The Eco-team developed the idea of designing a litter monitoring table, which could be used by the litter pickers at dinner time. Each day the litter monitors record the amount of items they pick and log the data in the table. At the end of each week the litter monitors tally all the data to assess how much litter has been picked.

Using the Pod’s resources

Key stage 1 children took part in the interactive Pod activity with George the Rat, which focuses on recycling waste. The children also discussed ways in which we can reduce litter in our school grounds by looking at which items we could recycle etc.

Educational resources used

Our whole school took part in Keep Britain Tidy's ‘Love Where You Live’ project, to tidy our school grounds.

Lessons learned

Enthusiasm, involvement and dedication. In our school the children are the voice of our eco-ideas and decision making.

Next steps

Our school has taken part in many Eco projects since we started our journey in September 2011. Our school has recently taken part in Fairtrade Fortnight and Climate Week. We are always looking for ways to improve our school grounds and make it more sustainable.

Our school is now undertaking a new project which is the development of a ‘Conservation Garden’. This is a major project where the children, staff and members of our local community are working extremely hard to turn our key stage 2 area into a quiet and relaxing place to go, whilst being surrounded by wildlife. 

Local Authority support

Our school has received support from Mr. Phil Chadwick, regarding our litter project and has made numerous visits to the school to help the children and staff with many activities/projects. For example; Litter picks, junk modelling and devising an Eco/Litter policy.