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Student staff member Lauren Roberts-Turner reflects on the Greener Schools programme
In November, I had the privilege of attend the Greener Schools Programme Celebration in the city hall, the mayor’s office.
The Greener Schools Programme is a London-focused, Greater London Authority (GLA)-funded project that supports 38 primary and secondary schools to decarbonise through funding retrofit activities such as solar panels or heat pumps. As part of this, 10 (predominantly primary) schools were selected to receive a climate education workshop. The decarbonisation workshop taught students about what retrofit work was being done at their school, what retrofit and decarbonisation are, how this linked to the climate crisis and how they can help. It has been a huge privilege to deliver these workshops and be invited into such amazing schools which are deeply committed to both their students’ education but also their future. Representatives from all the schools involved were invited to the City Hall to celebrate the project and I was incredibly lucky to get to go along and help out.
The day got off to a brilliant start as I bumped into pupils from Bevington School (pictured) where I had delivered a session the previous week and was able to catch up on how they were doing and walk to city hall with them. Once there, I caught up with our brilliant colleagues at RAFT who led on the retrofit aspect of the project and who ran exciting engagement sessions throughout the day.
I also got to meet those responsible for the project within the mayor’s office. It was amazing to see the commitment to sustainability threaded throughout city hall. Mete Coben, the deputy mayor for environment was called away at the last minute. However, the teachers and students heard from a senior member of staff at the Mayor’s Office who stayed to listen to different schools’ brilliant presentations about the different actions they were taking to tackle climate change and save energy at their schools. It was wonderful to see the students share the stage with a senior GLA staff member and the founder of RAFT, and have their ideas and commitment (literally) given centre stage.
The child-centred nature of the event exemplifies why it has been such a joy to work on this project. The combination of retrofitting schools and providing climate workshops at the same time reflects a commitment to climate action that doesn’t individualise responsibility and provides meaningful change. It also supports children to understand climate change, the changes that are happening to their school environment, and through this empower them as agents of change in their own lives and the wider world.