Eco Council 2020-21

Our Eco Council members will be announced soon. Watch this space ....

Looking After Our Environment!

We are very proud of our school environment and think that it is important that we look after it. One part of our role as Eco Council is to make sure that all litter is in the bin, all plants are kept watered, all dead plants are put into the compost bin and the compost bin is well maintained, making sure that we turn the waste and put a mixture of dry and wet waste in it. 

Environmental Parade

Our school theme in Term 6 last academic year was ‘Make this world a better place’, which the children were very engaged with.  To conclude the children’s learning on environmental issues the school invited the children to take part in an Environment Parade which took place on Monday 15th July around Whitstable.  It was a great success.

Please see below news clips that covered the parade.

Outdoor Classroom - Official opening

Frances Tophill, a presenter from TV’s Gardener’s World and Love Your Garden, came to school on Monday (15th July 2019) to officially open our Outdoor Classroom. She met with the school Eco Councillors and Mrs Ashton-Lovett, who told her how we are already using the area and our future plans for next year.

Lily in Blue Class has been undertaking a green recycling project by growing tomatoes in juice cartons.

Looking After Our Planet!

This year at Westmeads we have been making some huge changes around the school to promote a more sustainable future. In light of the war on plastics, we have been thinking about how we can reduce our single use plastic within school and we are pleased to let you know that after contacting our local milk supplier, we have now stopped receiving individual milk cartons with straws! We have opted to receive our milk in recyclable 4-pint milk bottles and now drink out of reusable beakers. It's a small change that will have a huge impact. Just think if roughly 60 children have milk each day we will be saving 10,800 straws and straw wrappers from entering landfill and/ or the ocean every year!!!!

And we haven’t stopped there, we have now teamed up with Terracycle to become a drop-off location for their Walkers Crisp packet recycling scheme. Once collected and sent, the crisp packets are separated by plastic type, cleaned, and extruded into plastic pellets to make new recycled products instead of entering land fill!  You can find the drop off point in the office reception area​.

We have continued to work hard to ensure that EVERYONE around the school behaves in an Eco friendly manner by keeping doors shut to keep heat in the classrooms, switching of lights when the classrooms is not in use, switching off computer monitors when they are not being used, using our recycle bins correctly, making sure fruit waste goes into the compost bin and helping our friends to remember not to over fill the water bottles. 

Gardening / Eco Club

In Term 4, Mrs Ashton-Lovett will be running a gardening club for all children. The children will be helping to get the pond and planting areas ready for spring as well as planting different seeds. We will also be thinking about how we can encourage more wildlife into our playground and outside areas.

Community Gardens

We are very lucky to have the Community Gardens in Stream Walk, which is only a five minute walk from school. Last year some of the classes visited the community gardens and really enjoyed the experience of finding out lots of information about our environment and different foods we can grow. They had the chance to try some of the foods grown at the Community Gardens including mint and lemon leaves and we are looking forward to visiting again this year.