The three Rs of climate change

As term began, 250 more-than-usually-excited Worcester children surged back through the gates of Redhill School. Fresh from the summer holidays, these are the first participants in an unprecedented experiment in sustainable learning. Terry Slavin finds out how much it can teach us.

Redhill school has been transformed – and it shows. But its new aerodynamic profile is not designed just to look flash. It’s meant to withstand the increased wind speeds predicted within the building’s 60-year life. Its overhanging eaves will protect their classrooms from the intense summer sun that we’re also told to expect with climate change. And other innovations will help cut the school’s own contribution to that global problem. Ground source heat pump technology provides low carbon heating, and a rain harvesting system means they won’t be wasting litres of drinking-quality water whenever they flush the toilet.

It’s also reassuring to know that the £2.7 million building’s sustainable drainage system is up to scratch when it’s really chucking it down outside. The school’s climate-proofing passed its first great test with flying colours during this summer’s torrential rains. At nearby Cherry Orchard Primary, 18 out of 20 classrooms were flooded. Redhill, by contrast, took the full brunt of the water and stayed dry.

But there’s more to this than making the buildings more sustainable. The aim is to bring these issues to life for the children, too – both inside and outside their lessons. “They wanted to use the building as a learning tool,” explains Robert Lewin Jones, principal architect for Worcestershire County Council (WCC), “so the children could understand climate change and get involved in reducing their CO2 emissions. This has really spurred them on.”

"If children get the sustainability bug when they are young, they could be converts"

For children, seeing is believing. That’s why the ground source heat pump, bringing up warmth from beneath the earth, has its work on show in the lobby via a computerised display panel – which also reveals how much rainwater is being harvested for the toilets. And instead of burying the sustainable drainage system in boxes underground, Lewin Jones designed a system of shallow ditches and ponds with bridges over them so the children can watch them fill up with rain water.

Like children everywhere, the pupils in Worcester’s schools will have to pick up the tab for previous generations’ blithe disregard of the planet. If they get the sustainability bug when they are young, they could be converts for life. Promoting sustainability in schools like Redhill seems like a no-brainer.

So why don’t all schools do it? Talk to the enthusiasts, and the same three issues keep coming up– getting full buy-in across the school and the local authority, making space in the curriculum… and money.

The Eco-Schools programme could be one part of the answer. A Europe-wide award scheme, co-ordinated in England by the environmental campaign charity Encams, it is specifically designed to raise the profile of tackling sustainability in schools. Those who do it well get Green Flag status, and now there’s £100,000 in prize money too, through a sponsorship deal with Currys.

Rupert Brakspear, the education for sustainable development officer for WCC, is a big fan. “It’s a fantastic off-the-peg framework for schools to look across a range of themes,” he says. “It joins up the thinking about inclusion and participation and local wellbeing, and puts kids at the heart of it.”

The government, in the shape of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), wants to see all schools signed up to Eco-Schools by 2020. So far, in England, 7,500 have done so – with a 70% leap in registrations last year, thanks to greater public awareness of climate change issues (and the prospect of prize money). Even so, there’s a long way to go: 7,500 is only one third of the total – and only 720 have reached Green Flag standard.

Andrew Suter thinks that government needs to get behind the scheme more forcefully. As director of Eco- Schools in England, he’s clearly envious of his counterpart north of the border, where three years ago the Scottish Executive required local councils to report on how many schools were taking up the programme. Participation rates in Scotland shot up from 17% to80%, and now Wales is planning to follow Scotland.

In England, however, there is no systemic approach to making it happen. Some authorities are doing little or nothing; others have embraced it as part of their climate change action plans. When they do, the enthusiasm can be contagious. According to Lewin Jones, one reason Worcestershire chose to do so much at Redhill was because it’s close to County Hall, so the council could keep an eye on progress, and hopefully use the same approach on future refurbishments. “We’re very excited about it,” he says. “The learning opportunities are enormous.”

“For me,” says Suter, “the best way is to make it a requirement for local authorities to support the scheme. Schools then get the help they need to implement it, and that makes a real difference.”

Not just with boosting registration numbers, but with making the Eco-Schools themes come alive in each school. “A lot of schools struggle to set the committee up, understand the basics and make progress,” says Suter. “The schools that do best are the ones that use it to deliver the curriculum, who don’t see it as an add-on. Schools where only one teacher is the driving force, and the head is not committed, don’t do as well.” They’re likely to falter when the championing teacher leaves the school and there is no one to pass the baton to.

"It’s not just about teachers who want to get a wind turbine acting as eco- warriors. It’s about getting children involved in the decision- making process"

Brakspear takes this point further. “It’s not just about teachers who want to get a wind turbine acting as eco- warriors. It’s about getting children involved in the decision-making process.” Which is particularly important, as he says, because “we know there are a lot of scary messages out there that can create a sense of despair among children without showing them a way to take positive action.”

Teaching teacher

The biggest barrier is often motivating teachers who have never had any training in environmental issues. Even today there are only a handful of degree courses on sustainability in teaching. But Brakspear is full of praise for an in-service training programme from WWF called Pathways. “In the vast majority of schools where we’ve used it, it has completely shifted the way they see sustainability, not as an add-on or another initiative, but something that relates to the whole school culture, cutting across curriculum, campus and community.” As Suter puts it: “The human brain retains 90% of what we do, but only a far smaller percentage of what we are told. Schools that experience it as well as teach it do perform well.”

Part of the point of Pathways is to show schools how sustainability can be incorporated into the curriculum. There’s a real problem here, says WWF’s Anna Birney. At its root is the testing-oriented model of teaching ordained by the government. “At the moment the predominant educational style is to open up the brain and pour in information,” she says. “But we need to prepare pupils for a constantly changing world, to think about how things happen and help them question who they are and how they operate in the world.”

"Our head is very enthusiastic, so are the caretakers, the dinner ladies, the governors. It hasn’t happened overnight; it’s something that has evolved over time"

It’s no surprise to her that the Eco-schools programme has seen far less take-up in secondary schools. Two welcome new developments provide real encouragement on this front. From this year, the National College for School Leadership, the government agency that trains headteachers, will put sustainability into all headship programmes. And the government’s exams watchdog, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, announced over the summer that the curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds will be slimmed down to free up a quarter of classroom time for subject matter chosen by teachers. So the drive is on to get sustainability up to the top of their priorities.

One of the best ways to bring it alive, for pupils and teachers alike, is to show renewable energy in action in their own buildings. Sadly, schools like Seaton are still a rarity; fewer than 1,000 can boast any form of renewable energy. And the success of the few is often due to highly motivated teachers or governors who know how to find government and corporate grants.

Talking money

When last school year was officially dubbed the Year of Action on Sustainable Development, the government issued a stream of policies and initiatives to push it into every aspect of school life. The DTI’s contribution was an unprecedented £50 million programme of grants, first announced in the 2006 budget, to help schools and other public sector bodies install renewable technologies.

Sadly, though, the excitement this aroused has all but evaporated, amid complaints about how confusing and badly administered it has been. The grants weren’t actually opened until this January; only 31 schools had applied by the end of the school year – and the programme runs out next March. Mike Wolfe, who advises Eco-Schools and is chief executive of Create, a charity driving sustainable energy in schools, doubts that the £50 million will now be spent.

The would-be suppliers are trying to make the best of it. Solarcentury, for instance, has done a deal with the Co-operative Bank which has put up £1 million to match-fund grants to install solar panels on 100 schools (such as St George’s in Harpenden – below right). But Gideon Richards goes so far as to describe the whole programme as “a disaster”. A renewable energy consultant and biomass heating expert who sits on the board of Create, he’s so frustrated that, he says, ”you have the feeling we are being set up to fail”.

"The human brain retains 90% of what we do, but a far smaller percentage of what we are told. Schools that experience it as well as teach it do perform well"

Richards is not the only one to complain of “a lot of words, and very little commitment from government”. You don’t have to be a cynic to question how much the ‘Year of Action’ has actually done to change the reality on the ground. WWF’s Anna Birney says the plethora of initiatives marked huge progress in policy terms, “but it was not necessarily a year of action for the schools”. Sustainability, she says, “isn’t a structure in the system yet.”

Even obvious basic steps can struggle for lack of money. “What frustrates me is that schools want grants for energy efficiency measures and they can’t get them,” says Wolfe. As he points out, energy efficiency measures like low energy light bulbs and A-rated appliances in school kitchens provide “the best returns in CO2 terms for least cost”. And, used in tandem with smart meters, they’d help teach children that there’s a lot more mundane stuff you can do for sustainability, even without wind turbines or solar panels. Create did run a schools energy efficiency programme for six years, but government funding dried up in 2002,leaving a gap that has yet to be filled, says Wolfe – who’s unimpressed by the DCSF’s argument that cash- strapped schools could still choose to do this stuff out of their devolved capital budgets.

What, though, of the government’s ambitious £45 billion Building Schools for the Future programme, which aims to rebuild or renovate every secondary school? Hundreds of these are being built every year – and sustainable construction expert George Martin, head of Re-thinking at Willmott Dixon, says it is vitally important that we get it right from the start. Although tight budgets have squeezed out many sustainability features in the schools that have been built, Martin is convinced this need not be the case.

Re-thinking has built a carbon neutral demonstration model School of the Future to show what can be done – right now:

• Made from recycled timber
• Maximises use of natural daylight and ventilation
• Built to minimise heating needs and prevent overheating in more extreme future climates
• Construction done offsite in a factory
• Assembly on site takes less than a week.

The sustainability features do cost more, Martin says, but this is balanced by cheaper factory construction, and he is confident that his schools can be built within the standard DCSF budget.

Worcestershire Council also managed to bring its climate-proof school refurbishment at Redhill in for the same price as a standard build – with the exception of the ground source heat pump, which came out of the council’s energy budget.

Laura Daniels, headteacher of Woodheys, sees the evidence every day for why it must be worth it. “The children seem to live and breathe the message now. It’s producing global citizens of the future.”

Terry Slavin is a regular writer for The Observer, specialising in environmental issues.

9 October 2007

Terry Slavin

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