
Following the success of our pilot with Mercia Trust earlier this year and our experience enabling youth voice in decision making at various organisations, we are launching a new offer to help secondary schools across the UK create a Sustainability Action Plans inspired by their students’ interests, insights and priorities.
S4TP Sustainable Schools enables a school and its senior leadership team and governors to learn what its students’ concerns and ideas are for how the school should tackle the climate crisis and be more sustainable or work towards net zero.
Working with a group of up to 60 students, over the course of a day, S4TP facilitates a fun and educational day for SLT and governors to hear their students’ suggestions for simple changes that could be made at the school.
Mercia Trust Case Study
During our pilot day at Mercia Trust, teams of students in Key Stage 2, 3 and 4 identified the sustainability challenges at their schools (using our audit tool in advance) and created a personalised action plan for their Trust to take on board.
Some ideas included:
- Creating more green spaces surrounding the schools, to increase biodiversity and learn about nature in their immediate environment
- Using grey water to flush toilets
- Considering the materials used in the school uniforms they were required to purchase (as they were predominantly made from manmade materials such as nylon)
- Utilising the location of certain schools, such as on the top of a hill to generate power with a wind turbine
- Streamlining some of the great practices they had in some schools across the whole school estate of the Trust (such as lights turning on and off with motion sensors; recycling points across the school specifically for paper)
- Amongst many more incredible ideas


Why work with S4TP Sustainable Schools?
Our Sustainable Schools offer is a fantastic way for your Trust or School to:
- Involve your students in thinking and decision-making about how to make your school more sustainable in 6 key areas energy, travel, water, biodiversity/nature, food and waste management
- Identify opportunities to connect learning with your built environment and school estate
- Facilitate conversations between SLT, governors and students around the climate crisis, sustainability and how your school can play its part
- Provide an opportunity for students across different year groups to work together on a specific project
- Understand what really matters to your student community in relation to sustainability and your role within it
What does S4TP Sustainable Schools involve?
We work with each School or Multi-Academy Trust to design a bespoke programme of support depending on what you need but each programme includes:
- An opportunity for students to use our Sustainable Schools audit tool to assess what’s good and not so good about their school in 6 key areas that directly relate to the curriculum and known priorities for schools (energy, water, waste management, biodiversity/nature, food and travel)
- A facilitated day with up to 60 students, SLT and governors to discuss results from the audit, identify priority areas and come up with hundreds of ideas to tackle the issues of most concern to the students that can feed into an action plan (of suggestions for the school)
- Follow up with SLT and governors to decide on which actions they will take forward and finalise and action plan, with support as needed
- A report and case study on what the school / trust has achieved
Want to find out more?
If you’re interested in discussing how we could support your school or trust to develop its own sustainability action plan please complete our expression of interest form below, or email fran@solutionsfortheplanet.co.uk .