We are very pleased to tell you that you and your Eco-Committee at Morley Newlands Academy have been successful in meeting the requirements for the Eco-Schools Green Flag Award.
We reviewed your application and noted the following:
Your Eco-Committee were elected democratically, which is a fair and mature approach – well done to selected members on their appointment! It’s brilliant that young people were given the responsibility for recording meeting minutes. As you will be aware, this allows them to take ownership of the Eco-Schools programme and develop their listening, communication and teamwork skills. Thank you for uploading a copy of your minutes, these clearly document talking points from the meeting as well as future goals and action points for the Eco-Committee to work on. Good work everyone! It’s brilliant to read that the Environmental Review helped your pupils to appreciate and celebrate everything that your school is already doing to benefit our environment whilst also enabling them to identify areas to work on in the future. It’s also fantastic that you say they were quick to offer solutions to problems they flagged up whilst carrying out the review – this is a sure sign of a confident, dedicated and passionate committee! It was a pleasure to read through the comments on your uploaded review and gain an insight into the rich discussions that occurred whilst completing it. It was great to see how you carefully considered findings from your Environmental Review and factored them into the creation of your Action Plan. A great sign of critical thinking! We love the variety of activities that you and your Eco-Committee planned for delivery, such as building bird boxes, planting trees, carrying out litter-picks and writing energy-saving tips for the school newsletter. This will no doubt have supported multi-disciplinary skills across your school. Your examples of learning correspond closely to your chosen Eco-Schools topics, providing an important real-world context for young people that will inspire and motivate and give them a more in-depth understanding of the projects that they are working on. Your Curriculum Link examples are also imaginative, practical and fun, making environmental education accessible and engaging, well done! Thank you for sharing some supporting evidence for this section; this really brought your application to life. You have placed a lot of emphasis on informing as many members of your school community as possible in your Eco-Schools work and this is a strength of your application. We love that as a school you are also using the power of social media to share your good work with the wider community. Getting involved with outside organisations such as the Woodland Trust and the Trans Pennine Rail upgrade scheme are great examples of collaboration. Your ability and willingness to form partnerships is impressive! We’ll all need to adopt this approach to fight the impacts of climate change in the future! Your greatest success is a brilliant achievement. Reducing your school’s energy usage, and ensuring everybody takes responsibility for this, is something to be very proud of and something which will leave a long-lasting legacy. Across your three chosen Eco-Schools topic you have had success this year – our team enjoyed reading your evaluations, and the figures provided here speak for themselves – a very successful year all round, keep up the great work! Your Eco-Code is fabulous! It’s a very professional-looking document, eye-catching and full of powerful messages. It’s a direct call to action. We love this! Thank you for your question suggestions for next year’s Environmental Review, they’re interesting and intelligent ideas that we will take into consideration when compiling next year’s review. Well done also for planning more formal actions like writing to your MP – this points to further evidence that your Eco-Committee know there are many different ways to create change. It has been an absolute pleasure to read through your application, you are a wonderful ambassador for the Eco-Schools programme and we are delighted, without hesitation, to award you an Eco-Schools Green Flag with Merit – congratulations
