Happy Earth Day 2023!

The global day was founded in 1970 with the intention to diversify, educate, and activate the environmental movement worldwide. This year’s theme is “Invest In Our Planet”, encouraging individuals, businesses and governments to invest in technologies and practices that can benefit the Earth.

Earthday.org works with more than 150,000 partners in nearly 192 countries to build environmental democracy. More than 1 billion people now participate in Earth Day activities each year.

As part of our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy, we have committed to achieving Certified B Corporations, or B Corps status by 2025. B Corps are companies verified by B Lab to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. There are only around 1,300 B-Corps in the UK and we aspire to be the first provider in the SEN sector to achieve this status.

Across our schools, we actively teach our children and young people about environmental and sustainability issues so they can understand the wider environmental challenges we face.  This is done through discussions, projects, problem-solving and decision-making tasks, and field trips, which provide learners with the opportunities to understand the changes that need to be applied at a local, national and global levels.

As we continue to grow, we are conscious of our environmental footprint and work to ensure we install modern up to date systems and develop our understanding of new technologies to ensure maximum benefit from these investments in our projects.

All of our new build and refurbishment projects are:

• Insulated to reduce use of natural gas, propane, fuel oil, and electricity to heat and cool buildings.
• Air tested to ensure fewer gaps windows, ceilings and doors which means less heat lost to the outside world making our insulation more efficient and reducing fuel use.
• Installed with heat recovery systems which provides fresh filtered air into buildings using the energy that has already been used in heating the building.

In addition to this, we are committed to:

• Installing new LED lighting and replacing existing lighting. LED lighting will reduce our carbon footprint instantly and if we have a range of 200 traditional light fittings in a school, and replace them with LED, it will typically take about 17.5 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere each year.
• Making the most of natural light through good use of windows, roof lights, sun pipes, etc will help to reduce your need for artificial lighting.
• Installing smart meters and building management systems to ensure we have visibility of gas/electric use.