Climate Change

Climate Change Action Plan

What are our core school values?

As a school, we encourage our children to:

Responsibility for themselves and others,

Friendship depends on working together, caring for others, and looking after our shared world,

Respect life in all its forms,

Creativity drives new ways of thinking, solving problems, and inspiring action,

Perseverance – not giving up and being courageous to stand up for things we believe in.

Kindness to one another and the world in which we live.

Therefore, our Sustainability Climate Action Plan for 2025 (and beyond) is bound by these core values as well as our common purpose to ensure we unlock the potential within our school community, enabling people to realise their abilities, ideas, and sense of responsibility to create positive change.

What is Climate Change?

A change in global or regional acclimate patterns, in particular a change apparent from mid to late 20th Century onwards and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

There are many factors that can make the Earth warmer and colder including:

greenhouse gases caused by human activity,
deforestation, where more than half of the world’s surface has been ploughed and paved,
ozone layer trapping heat closer to the Earth’s surface
different types of air pollution which have different effects on the atmosphere.

The challenge of climate change is formidable. For children and young people to meet it with determination, and not with despair, we must offer them not just truth, but also hope. Learners need to know the truth about climate change – through a knowledge-rich education. They must also be given the hope that they can be agents of change, by learning actively, exploring real‑world problems or meaningful questions over an extended period of time.

What can we do?

The DFE has called on all education sectors to create a sustainability climate action plan to show how we, as a school community, can support national and international initiatives which are aimed at protecting the world through direct climate action. As a school, we have important role to play in this, particularly reducing our environmental footprint to work towards net zero and giving all children, young people and adults the knowledge and skills to thrive in the green economy and to help restore nature.

Through our sustainability climate action plan, we will engage directly with children and young people who are passionate about the natural world, want to do their best to protect it and can influence their wider communities.

Through their learned and lived experiences from early years to Year 6, our children will develop a broad knowledge and understanding of the importance of nature, sustainability and the causes and impact of climate change and to translate this knowledge into positive action and solutions.

Using the four areas identified in the DFE’s Sustainability and climate change strategy Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems - GOV.UK our sustainability and climate action plan will focus on:

Decarbonisation: taking action to reduce carbon emissions and becoming more energy efficient.
Adaptation and Resilience: taking action to reduce the risk of flooding and overheating.
Biodiversity: ensuring learning is local, practical, and hopeful and utilising the area in which we live: the River Dee, meadows, hedgerows, ponds, woodlands and the Dee Cliffs, as well as engagement within wider Cheshire and Chester nature‑recovery projects.
Climate Education and Green Careers: knowledge rich comprehensive teaching about climate change.

It will also include:

Creating an environment from an early age where we can connect to nature is essential for self-enforcement in protecting and valuing nature’. Ensuring our children will:

spend time in nature and learn more about it
become actively involved in the improvement of their local environment
know that regular contact with green spaces can have a beneficial impact on their physical and mental health.

Climate adaptation and decarbonisation activities can provide powerful learning opportunities. We will ensure our children will: