Oasis Academy Arena celebrates a Silver Eco-Schools accolade

Students in the Eco Committee at Oasis Academy Arena achieved the Eco Schools Silver Award for their efforts making the South Norwood secondary school more environmentally friendly. Their action plan aims to help tackle some of the biggest issues in the school including litter, recycling and biodiversity.

The committee introduced plastic bottle recycling facilities and encouraged the entire student body to join in the effort by creating and distributing anti-littering posters throughout the school and leading a school-wide recycling and anti-littering assembly. They have also tried to tackle the issue of single-plastics used more generally throughout the school and investigated the school curriculum to assess whether it covered the Eco-Schools’ ‘Ten Topics’.

Year 9 student Fraser said of their efforts, “Being on the Eco-Schools team has meant that I have been able to make a change to the way that the school operates, thus making an improvement.”

Now, the eco-friendly students are looking beyond their own academy, and are aiming to contribute to a new recycling scheme across the 52 schools in the Oasis Community Learning family.

They hope to continue their projects this year, even throughout lockdown, with the ultimate aim of achieving green flag status and embedding a number of environmental initiatives into the fabric of Oasis Academy Arena.

Geography Teacher and Eco-Coordinator Jon Channon commented, “The Eco-Schools programme has been a fantastic way to evaluate our current initiatives at Oasis Arena and help radically transform them (with the students help). They identified a number of areas that we needed to improve as a school (including improving biodiversity, increasing recycling and reducing litter) and have been consistently involved in projects to try and achieve this. A huge thank you to the students for their help on this.”

Rowena Stone, Project Manager & Environmental and Sustainability Lead at Oasis Community Learning commented on the academy’s achievement saying; “The work at Oasis Academy Arena by their Eco-Committee is fantastic and shows the students and staff’s dedication to becoming a more sustainable and environmentally friendly school. OCL’s Environmental Sustainability working group hopes to support Arena’s Eco-Committee with establishing a new a waste and recycling contract that will improve recycling facilities on site and provide further opportunities for recycling. One of the initiatives that Arena already benefits from is being on a 100% renewable energy plan for their electricity from 1st November 2020.”

There are over 20,100 registered Eco-Schools in England with the aim of raising awareness of environmental issues and improving the school environment.