This is an environmental group that has been set up by Mr R.Tucker, one of our teachers, to focus on the issue of Sustainable Development at Notley High. 

The group comprises of 12 pupils and 2 teachers, including Mrs S.Wallace from the Science Department. 8 pupils  were elected from the Year 7 tutor groups and 4 Year 8 pupils selected to lead the group.

The group members are:

7N Shaleem Ahmed 7N
7O Kathryn Woodhall-Jones
7T  Laura Ingate
7L  Adam Davey
7E  Chloe King
7H  Sarah Taylor
7S  April Woulfe
7Y  Sophie Rann
8O  Charley Murphy
8Y  Tayma Spenceley
8E  Jonathan Rawlinson
8S  Shaheem Ahmed

We have signed Essex County Councils ‘The Green Pledge’ and I be attending its launch at County Hall, Chelmsford on February 7th. We also hope next year that we will be in a position to apply for the Eco-schools Award, a national scheme for recognising outstanding work in schools.

We meet every Wednesday with Mr R.Tucker and Mrs S.Wallace. Our group have recently undertaken an environmental audit of the school on issues such as energy, waste, water, recycling and wildlife biodiversity. We then discussed our school’s strengths and weaknesses and identified two main priorities to focus on. We identified the school’s wildlife biodiversity and waste/recycling as our two main priorities that needed most attention. We have also designed our own LOGO.

On Friday 18th January Mr Tucker organised an outreach education programme with Essex Wildlife Trust to visit our school for the day to work with our group. Becky Gibson, Education Liaison Officer, from the Trust’s Hanningfield Nature Reserve discussed how we could effectively improve the biodiversity on the school premises. We really enjoyed our day and got a lot out of it.

We have lots ofideas to improve our school environment; one of these is to install a Bird Box Camera that links to our school website and the school mediaserver. Images could be beamed live in Science classrooms as well as on the school T.V monitors and also to pupils at home.

We wish to put up bird/bat boxes, bird feeders and get a bat detector as well as start composting in the school. These items would all help improve the School’s environment and towards meeting our overall aims.  We have been selling 100 ‘Womble’ trolley tokens to teachers and parents which has raised us some money so far. The school grounds are extensive and we also have a number of school quad areas that do not presently encourage any wildlife in to them.

We will let you know more about what we achieve over the coming months.

 “For the world of tomorrow think about today”

Thank you for your support.

Charley Murphy

Oui Care Chairperson

Notley High School