Fairfield High School’s student eco team is an active group of students who care passionately about their immediate environment and the world as a whole. Despite the tricky times COVID has thrown at them, they have managed to put into place a number of impressive and sustainable initiatives, which have had a swift and positive impact on the school’s 1,100 student population.
In collaboration with representatives from the charities Sustrans and Living Streets, the eco team has focused its attention on encouraging people from the school community to use more environmentally friendly ways to travel such as cycling and walking.
Actions include:
• Running a survey to see how people travel to school, and how they would like to travel to school.
• Creating a social media competition where people posted photos they had taken on walks. Photos were posted tagging #activeFHS and @ec0team, and were entered into a £15 voucher prize draw. Every fortnight there was a different theme for photos, such as shadows or graffiti.
• Raising awareness of the benefits of walking and giving advice to students, especially to boys, on how to make the streets less threatening for women and girls.
• Providing sessions for people to have their bikes checked over.
• Encouraging people to cycle by holding prize draws to enter when bikes are locked up at school.
• Finding areas of walking infrastructure that needed to be improved and collating a document of photos, issues, and locations to send to the council.
“These initiatives are down to the energy, drive and determination of the students, most of whom have now moved on to Sixth Form,” said Bobby Walker, Geography Teacher and Leader of Eco Team at Fairfield High School. “I am delighted to hear they are continuing their positive activism in the wider community and we now have a new cohort of eco-warriors to build on their legacy.