Award-winning school garden at Highfield
Green practices can keep down schools’ costs – and therefore fees. But there are other benefits too, argues Dan Townend.
Everyone is keen to protect the environment, and schools today are driven by a highly vocal pressure group of small, eager faces who want to save the polar bear and protect trees; or older, more discerning, but no less vocal teenagers who want to discuss the issues of global warming versus climate change. However, whether pre-prep, prep or public school, the issues for the bursars balancing the books are the same. There is a perceived concern that the investment required to ‘go green’ is just too much – but is it?
“Everybody wants to be green but they don’t want to pay for it,” says Iain McAlister, director of the Cost Reduction Company, who advises schools on how to cut their running costs, often by going green. “We try to be a little bit more proactive. One of the problems of going green is having the time and keeping up the momentum. If you manage to reduce consumption you should shout about it and try and get people involved.”
Children at the RHS
Some green schemes are simply common sense, such as switching off lights and computers and having shorter showers, and don’t involve too much effort. But even the more technological ways of being environmentally friendly need not be too disruptive. Among the schemes that McAlister and his team have introduced to schools have been wireless systems to monitor and switch off electrical systems when not in use; systems to convert waste food into bio-mass fuel; installations of air-injected shower heads that use 30 per cent less water, and ground source heat pumps in new builds to help cut heating bills.
Sometimes – particularly in established schools where old buildings are difficult to alter or are protected – substantial changes can be difficult to make, and very expensive even if they are allowed. Putting solar panels on a 17th-century building often doesn’t go down well with planning authorities. But there are ways of going green without it costing the earth.
There are a huge number of grants and loans available to support green initiatives. Among the biggest schemes are the Community Sustainable Energy Programme and the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s capital grants scheme for sustainable energy projects. Both offer significant amounts (potentially up to £1m) for investments in projects harnessing green energy, such as solar power, wind-turbines and biomass boilers. The Green Energy Trust offers up to £25,000 for sustainable energy projects.
There are also grants for simpler programmes. For instance, the Forest Education Initiative offers up to £5,000 for schemes to help manage woodland areas and educate pupils about them, while the British Ecological Society will help with concepts related to the teaching of ecology.
Some of the funds available are from more unexpected sources. A range of firms, including Ford, Volvo, O2, Asda, Hilton Hotels and B&Q, are all keen to expand their environmental credentials by offering schools and communities money to either start green projects or at least help the community.
One way in which the Cost Reduction Company engages with clients is to monitor consumption in real time so people can see what they are saving. McAlister claims that his company has saved schools hundreds of thousands of pounds. “Part of it is about education and getting the school involved and changing their practices,” McAlister explains. “You could say it’s about making things more visible.”
Solar panels on the roof at Bradfield College generate electricity
Despite its traditional background, Bradfield College, which has around 700 boarders on its Wiltshire grounds, must be one of the greenest schools in the country. Air-infused shower-heads, a renegotiation of fuel tariffs, bio-digesters and a 42 per cent cut in waste material across the school have all been implemented to reduce outgoings. A programme on the school’s intranet allows everyone to monitor energy consumption and an energy manager on the staff oversees it all. A new science block under construction promises to be very much a statement building.
“The idea is to engage the students when we can and get them involved,” says assistant bursar Ian Barnes. “We have embraced a lot of environmental issues, made a number of changes and are looking at more.” And the hard figures? The school estimates a potential saving of around £200,000 a year, with more likely to come.
Bradfield has the advantage of being a big establishment, so savings of scale are dramatic. But schools of all sizes can benefit from green practices. Caldicott Prep School in Buckinghamshire maybe smaller than Bradfield but it is also seeing the green light. Bursar Adrian Hollyer says that small changes can easily be made with a little time and planning. “So when a window is broken, it is replaced with double-insulated glass,” he says by way of example. “We have also just put in a voltage optimiser to regulate the electricity supply and that seems to be making quite a lot of savings. We are also looking at biomass possibilities.”
Like many independent schools, one of Caldicott’s current aims is to try to pass on any savings they make to parents. “We are trying to keep our fees down – we have only raised them by two per cent this year and I think the green movement has made a real contribution to that,” says Hollyer, who recognises that not only are they saving money but, at the same time, they are teaching a new generation green practices.
Teaching our children green ethics may be perceived by the money men as a secondary advantage, but recent research suggests this also pays dividends. While on an educational and personal level, youngsters are learning where their food comes from when they tend a vegetable patch and understand that leaving the lights blazing all night wastes electricity and costs money, allowing children to get their hands dirty at the same time is proven to be good character-building stuff.
The Royal Horticultural Society carried out a study of schools and teachers and discovered that children who were actively involved in tending gardens were more resilient, confident and independent learners, who had built up a range of social skills such as teamwork, entrepreneurship and, most important of all, self-esteem.
According to Dr Simon Thornton Wood, director of science and learning at the RHS, gardens enable a creative, flexible approach to teaching that has significant benefits. “Schools that integrate gardens and gardening into the curriculum are developing children who are much more responsive to the challenges of adult life,” he says. There is also the consideration that they might eat more healthily if they are allowed to sample the fresh vegetables they have grown themselves. There are currently more than 12,000 schools signed up to the RHS’s Campaign for School Gardening.
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Everybody wants to be green but they don’t want to pay for it |
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Green projects are increasingly becoming a part of everyday school life. The British Government wants every school to be a sustainable school by 2020. In 2006,the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) launched their Sustainable Schools Framework listing key targets – from learning about sustainable development issues to introducing sustainable practices into everyday school life.
How these green policies are introduced varies. Eco Schools is an international award programme set up by the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE) with 40,000 member schools in 46 countries, which sets out guidelines and a framework for schools wishing to embed these principles into the heart of school life.
Schools, led by the children, work towards gaining one of three awards – Bronze, Silver and the prestigious Green Flag award, which symbolises excellence in the field of environmental activity. The children lead the eco-committee and help carry out an audit to assess the environmental performance of their school and, then, in consultation with the rest of the school, they are the ones who decide which environmental themes they want to address and how they are going to do it.
For other schools it is simply a matter of using green opportunities to make class work more exciting and interesting. Some schools have managed to do both – such as Twycross House, an independent school for eight to18 year olds on the Leicestershire/Warwickshire border.
Here, a long-term scheme to clean up a disused school pond by installing a solar-powered oxygenating pump has allowed pupils to make use of a previously derelict area. Flowers and wildlife are flourishing and it means pupils – many of whom won Duke of Edinburgh Award commendations working to clean up the site – have somewhere to sit at lunchtime.
Like many of the schools that have experimented with going green, the project has opened doors to hands-on teaching in subjects such as maths, geography, science and biology.
It seems that going green isn’t just saving money and helping the environment, but it is also teaching our children something just as valuable – how to be confident and happy human beings, outside the classroom as well as in.
Some cost-cutting measures that the Cost Reduction Company has introduced to schools:
● Wireless systems that can monitor air conditioning, lights and computer use, and switch off systems when not in use.
● Waste food – which is a particular issue at boarding schools – can be turned into a woodchip-like bio-mass fuel within three days to help cut fuel costs.
● Air-injected shower heads can give the same power-shower experience but use 30 per cent less water at the same time.
● Ground-source heat pumps – where natural heat is taken from the earth and used to warm buildings – are being installed in many new builds to help cut heating bills.
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