Our Eco Council was established after a year 6 pupil wrote to Mr. Cairns to make the case for setting one up. She argued that the school could do more to support the environment - we had to agree! The pupil, who is now in secondary school, read a large number of applications and recruited members to the team. Working alongside Mr Thompson (our vice chair of governors, who also happens to work for the Environment Agency) and Mr Meaton (our link member of staff) the Eco-Council set off on making a positive change within Belle Vue Primary School and beyond. 

One of the first tasks our Eco Council did was to create a mission statement in order to guide the Eco-Council in future years. After looking at a number of professional mission statements, from multi-national organisations to local charities, our Eco-Council came up with their vision for the future. What do you think? 

Belle Vue Primary School Eco Council will help others to create and develop a sustainable school life, supporting a healthy planet. We set ambitious and innovative goals, inspiring our school, our community and our city.

“Small things make a big difference.”

To establish a starting point for the school, the Eco-Council then conducted a school environmental review. As you can see below, the school has quite a few areas that we can improve!

Our first eco-council meeting was a great success and our concillors have some fantastic ideas for the year ahead! Suggestions included reducing food waste within school, meat-free Mondays and setting up a gardening club to keep on top of overgrown hedges and nettles on school grounds- both brilliant ideas! 

This academic year we have elected new Eco-councillors throughout school, and we are very excited to have Year 1 on board! We kicked off the year by taking on the 'Cut Your Carbon' challenge; throughout November we tasked students and their families to make positive lifestyle changes in order to cut carbon usage. As a school, we will aim to continue making choices which will help our planet beyond November. Well done to all those who have made changes in support of the initiative!  

This academic year, new members of our Eco-Council were elected by their peers. So far, we have held several meetings to  discussed our projects, which include planting hundreds of trees, creating a new wildflower meadow and reducing waste within the school. The Eco-council have also enjoyed planting some bulbs in our new wild area, which we hope will look lovely when they shoot in the Spring! 

Over the course of 2 days, each pupil successfully planted a tree in our school grounds. Working collaboratively, Belle Vue Primary School students managed to plant over 200 trees in total! We planted two hedgerows (one along the edge of our orchard area and the other running adjacent to our wild area), which are great for encouraging nesting bird species. We also planted numerous individual trees around the school grounds, filling out our orchard area and adding some more trees to the field opposite the bike sheds. We planted sessile oak, silver birch, hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn and rowan trees. We can't wait to watch them grow!