Sustainability Statement

Here at Madresfield CE Primary School, we consider sustainability and climate education vitally important to the school, pupils, families and wider community. 

Madresfield is a small, rural school surrounded by an abundance of nature.  Our school grounds have a wide range of habitats including grass playing fields, trees and bushes.  We have a beautiful outdoor forest school area, outdoor classrooms and a cottage garden and are lucky to also have a pond habitat on our site for our children to explore.  Our raised beds enable children to have hands on gardening and growing experience aiding understanding of food, nutrition in addition to the positive impact it has on their wellbeing.

We believe that sustainability begins with education and by nurturing our pupils passion for the environment we enable them to connect their own lives and habits to what’s going on in the wider world. 

Sustainability topics are divided across the school year groups; the complexity of issues covered increases as the children become older. Addressing climate change and sustainability cannot be confined to a single unit or subject and it should not be an add-on; for real impact, these issues must be embedded across the entire curriculum.  The Kapow Sustainability and Climate Change Progression of Knowledge and Skills document (below) ensures that knowledge and skills related to climate change develop cumulatively rather than an ad hoc or disconnected way.

Embedded within the curriculum the children develop an appreciation of nature and then go on to learn about resources and waste management, climate change, food waste, recycling and water conservation, habitats and ecology. As a school community we accept that waste exists in many forms and is part of all our lives and we all learn what we can do as an individual, a school and wider community to reduce our carbon footprint (individual and collective responsibility).

Madresfield has developed it's initial Climate Action Plan which will be developed and refined over the next 18 months.