Creating a Climate Action Plan at Drake Primary School
The National Education Nature Park is part of the Department for Education’s Climate Change and Sustainability Strategy, and works alongside three other programmes that support schools, nurseries and colleges to have a positive impact on both their students and the environment.
The free support from these four programmes can be used together to bring about a multitude of wellbeing, learning and environmental benefits. They also support settings with the development of their Climate Action Plans, which the DfE are expecting schools to have in place by the end of 2025. The programmes are:
- Sustainability Support for Education: a digital hub of resources, services and tools to help you identify appropriate action to create or develop your Climate Action Plan
- Climate Ambassadors and Let's Go Zero Climate Action Advisors: provide expert knowledge and on the ground support for schools to develop and deliver Climate Action Plans
- National Education Nature Park: provides curriculum-linked resources to embed climate and nature across subjects, and empowers children and young people to make take action for the future by transforming their school grounds
All of the free support, resources and guidance from the programmes have been designed to be adaptable and flexible so schools can use them in the way that works best for them.
In this blog, we spoke to Drake Primary School to see how they’ve been getting stuck in with the different programmes to create their Climate Action Plan and continue their sustainability journey.
Drake Primary School's sustainability journey
Drake Primary School is a primary school in Norfolk, who have been embedding climate and nature education across their school in both curriculum teaching and extra-curricular activities. They’re already involved with environmental education programmes such as the Woodland Trust’s Green Tree Schools Award, Eco Schools and Green Schools Project, and have been getting involved in the Department for Education commissioned programmes to build on this work and develop their Climate Action Plan.
They first heard about the DfE programmes through attending a Climate and Nature Action in Education event at the University of East Anglia. They signed up for a visit from a Climate Ambassador and Let’s Go Zero Climate Advisor, who visited Drake Primary along with a representative from the East of England Nature Park regional team, and they got started!
Creating their Climate Action Plan
Drake have been working with the team of regional staff from the programmes and combined the advice from the National Education Nature Park, Climate Ambassadors and Let's Go Zero to write a Climate Action Plan structured around the four pillars required: decarbonisation, adaptation and resilience, biodiversity and climate education.
Drake started by working with their local Let’s Go Zero Climate Action Advisor – Luciana de Almeida – to look at the decarbonisation pillar of their Climate Action Plan. Together, they used the Eco-Schools Count Your Carbon tool to calculate the carbon footprint of the school and identify areas to improve, making a plan for next steps and how to involve pupils in these actions.
"Support from school leadership is key to achieving sustainability goals. From the outset, Drake Primary school leaders prioritised sustainability, ensuring staff had the capacity and resources to work on their Climate Action Plan with Let’s Go Zero,” says Luciana. “Sustainability leads therefore had the support to attend training and implement some of our recommendations right away. One key action was appointing a sustainability governor and making sustainability a regular agenda item in staff meetings, which has already led to impressive progress in all areas of their Climate Action Plan”.
Let’s Go Zero also recommended that they analysed their out-of-school hours energy usage and survey which electrical items were left on after school. After noticing significant electricity usage in the evenings, Luciana advised them to focus particularly on the iPad charging banks and printers, and to place them on timers. Drake acted on this promptly and engaged the students in finding out how much energy each piece of school equipment uses.
Kit Marie Rackley is the Climate Ambassadors Regional Coordinator for the East of England and has been working closely with Drake Primary on the adaptation and resilience pillar of their Climate Action Plan. Kit Marie supported them to link their plan to statutory requirements, auditing their safeguarding policy with regards to the results of climate change such as flooding, overheating and extreme cold weather.
“Drake decided that the next step would be to evaluate their current safeguarding policies with the aim to make them more 'climate literate',” says Kit Marie. “We looked at different safeguarding categories such as 'Mental Health & Wellbeing' and 'Community Engagement' and assessed against statements such as 'We ensure that mental health support is available for students who have experienced climate-related disasters.
“As well as inspiring confidence in what a climate-literacy safeguarding policy looks like, this process has helped Drake to prioritise their next steps, one of them being to make small changes to their safeguarding policies such referencing climate emergency plans in the 'Adaptation & Resilience' section of their Climate Action Plan.”
The National Education Nature Park has been helping Drake with both the biodiversity and climate education elements of their Climate Action Plan. Teachers carried out the Hidden Nature Challenge with their Year 3 classes and have taken part in the mapping your site activity with support from Nature Park Regional Officer Jenna Gilmour. This has helped them to understand their starting point, to identify what’s currently living and growing on their site and opportunities to improve it for wildlife and the school community. They’ve been linking the Nature Park activities to the Drake curriculum and are planning on continuing to use them in the years to come.
“Drake have already made some amazing changes to their site, such as the wildlife pond and gardening area, all with the purpose of connecting their students to nature,” says Jenna. “The Nature Park resources have been valuable in getting Drake started and helping staff feel confident in running more nature-based lessons. Come summer, they will be looking at how this nature-based and outdoor learning can be embedded in the curriculum, with some suggestions and resources already being used from Nature Park.”
Drake are planning on having a BioBlitz, with each year group studying a different area of the school grounds throughout the year. They’ll link this with Nature Park activities, such as using the Hidden Nature Challenge and other digital tools to facilitate and evidence the BioBlitz.
Alongside regional staff from the programmes, the Sustainability Support for Education is a one-stop shop for all education settings to get started with building their Climate Action Plans quickly, easily and thoroughly. It provides quality-assured resources and links to the other programmes to guide settings through creating and developing their plans, no matter where they are on their sustainability journey.
Looking ahead
With their Climate Action Plan in place, Drake are looking ahead to the future to keep driving their sustainability journey forward.
“The support we have received from the programmes has been amazing and has helped us create our Climate Action Plan,” says Sara Farish, a Sustainability Lead at Drake Primary. “Having worked with these programmes it has helped us to prioritise actions that need to be taken but also helped to keep us grounded and not feel overwhelmed by the workload and challenges we face ahead.”
Drake are planning on further embedding climate change into their curriculum, so that every child has opportunities to learn about the causes and impacts of climate change. As part of this, they are encouraging self-regulation as part of their climate change education, to provide a space for staff and children to discussing their emotional reactions to climate change and develop positive self-regulation strategies to manage eco-anxiety.
“The programmes will also help us to work towards our climate change education vision: to ensure that all teachers and school leaders are equipped to give children and young people the knowledge and tools to understand climate change, take climate action and protect the environment.”
Danielle Ware, Sustainability Lead at Drake Primary