We are very pleased to tell you that you and your Eco-Committee at Wilshere-Dacre Junior Academy have been awarded an Eco-Schools Green Flag.

We reviewed your application and noted the following:

It's wonderful that you have appointed such a large and representative Eco-Committee, this shows your school’s excellent commitment to both the programme and the eco-cause. We love your democratic and fair approach to appointing Eco-Committee members. It’s great to see that other pupils played a part in the process. We love that you kept minutes from your meetings and that they helped to track, guide and prompt your activity. It was great to see that young people were responsible for completing those meeting minutes – this helps them develop new skills! This is a mature and professional approach. Great work! It was wonderful to see how completing your Environmental Review helped to raise the level of awareness in your school and helped your Eco-Committee to identify the issues and spot gaps in your school's existing environmental activity. But equally important is that it helped you to recognise the great work that you were already doing. This helps to keep up the good activity whilst making you feel empowered to do different things. We love this! We love the range of activities that you and your Eco-Committee planned for delivery. The fact that they cover both indoor (energy Monitors and a ‘switch-off’ campaign, plants in every classroom and the Big Plastic Count) and outdoor (Big Spring Clean, installing a bird bath & feeders and planting seeds & vegetables) activities is excellent. It was also great to see accountability and a monitoring scheme clearly marked in your Action Plan, although we were surprised there was no Evaluation system in place. Great work though! You’ve clearly embedded the ethos of the Eco-Schools programme far and wide in your school! We love your ambition in tackling areas where you scored lowest in the Environmental Review. This shows you have a confident Eco-Committee dedicated to maximising their impacts. We’re really impressed at how you’ve linked environmental issues to a variety of curriculum areas. We loved seeing the excellent examples of your Climate Day and Placards assembly PowerPoints and the photos of pupil’s work, posters, displays and activities. This is a great example of layering in sustainability and climate change into your studies. We loved reading about how you had incorporated learning about global issues not only into the Geography and Science Curriculum (most common ones) in your school, but also into other areas such as PSHE and English. Great work! A challenge for next year might be expanding this to incorporate these issues into other areas of learning like Maths, Art or D&T! Your Eco-Board is great. Your board is incredibly visual and engaging and promotes your work in a very attractive way. We loved seeing how active your Eco-Committee was in communicating their activities school-wide with both assembly and class feedback and use of the school newsletter, website and social media as well as the Eco-board itself. These all combine to make a great approach! We love that your pupils have taken their great work beyond the school gates and into their local community with your tree planting for National Tree Week and your work with Plastic Free Hitchin. We were delighted by your Climate Day protest and that you have successfully banned 2/3 types of single-use plastic from your school – outstanding effort all round! We are certain that your pupils will have greatly benefitted from your involvement with such outside organisations as Terracycle, One Step Greener, Switch-off Fortnight, Keep Britain Tidy (naturally) and the Big Plastic Count, to name but a few. The parent quote is a great testament to the work that you are doing with your Eco-Committee, that they are taking their Eco-Schools work home with them and getting their families on board is something to be proud of! I hope you and your Eco-Committee take great pride in your achievements, when listed it's almost astonishing how many there are – however, the real improvements to your school environment with your energy saving and plastics reducing measures and, most of all, your great external climate awareness and activism (we loved those) all nicely stand out! Everyone involved should be incredibly proud of the changes they have made. We thought your Eco-Code was brilliant! It was punchy and really creative, setting out tangible and accessible calls to action your whole school can get behind! And creating it as a poem is very cool. Congratulations to everyone for the great work you have managed to do, earning your Green Flag with Distinction in style. You should all be very proud of your work and the application you have submitted!

As always THANK YOU very much for your hard work, we are so proud of all our schools and the collective achievements they have made to protect our planet for future generations. We look forward to working with Wilshere-Dacre Junior Academy again next academic year to help you expand on your eco-actions and successes of this year.

Have a great summer break,

The Eco-Schools Team