Environmental Sustainability

Climate considerate; taking action on energy and carbon to become net zero

We are committed to reducing our direct emissions significantly, making energy efficiencies and renewable sources our priority and eventually offsetting residual emissions where we are unable to completely eliminate. We will reduce our indirect emissions by working closely with our supply chain especially long-term partnerships and by embedding environmental sustainability throughout our curriculum.

Nature hopeful; being stewards of biodiversity, water, and air to enhance the natural world

We are committed to helping restore nature and encouraging it to flourish in our outdoor spaces no matter how big or small. By creating and educating about healthy ecosystems we will improve the health and wellbeing of our staff, students and local communities whilst preventing pollution and supporting our estates to be resilient to the changing climate.

Self-controlled consumers; acting responsibly regarding waste to use resources sustainably

We are committed to evolving to a circular economy where resources are truly valued. They are sourced, produced, used, and disposed of sustainably, and as consumers, we are making conscious choices through education to achieve this. We will consider whole life cycles, from the food we serve to the academies we build, so that efficiency is optimised, and waste avoided.

Read more about our commitments in our Environmental Sustainability Policy below.

Please click here to read our Environmental Sustainability Policy.

We have introduced Eco-Champions in each of our academies who meet every half term to share ideas and support each other in making change in their own settings. Many of our Eco-Champions run eco clubs made up of climate-passionate students and lots of our academies have been running their own sustainability weeks to spread the word and turn ideas into actions.

Members of our Environmental and Sustainability Working Group are working with our National Curriculum team to ensure environmental sustainability is built into the new Oasis Curriculum.

Our regularly updated internal Environmental and Sustainability portal shares fantastic news stories from our academies and what is happening worldwide.

Finally, in January 2023, we welcomed our first ever National Environmental and Sustainability Manager to Oasis Community Learning. This role supports our national team as well as our staff and students in becoming a more environmentally responsible trust. It also links with the DfE’s Climate Change and Sustainability Strategy target of each education setting having a sustainability lead.

Our trust-wide targets are:
To be net zero carbon by 2030 in our Scope 1 and 2 emissions
Our baseline year is the academic year 2021-22, since then we have reduced our carbon footprint by 12.5% (17.3% using a per pupil intensity ratio metric). The vast majority of our academies run on renewable electricity therefore the majority of this footprint is made up of our heating and hot water gas use.
To achieve a 75% recycling rate average across the trust, to send zero waste to landfill and be reducing our waste volumes annually

Our baseline year is the academic year 2022-23 where we had a recycling rate of 19.5% overall. This year we have implemented a new recycling system of food waste recycling, mixed (card, paper, plastics and metals) recycling and general waste and in December 2023 our recycling rate had risen to 27.1%. Our contract with Veolia ensures zero waste gets sent to landfill and we are working hard to reduce our overall volumes of waste too by adopting the waste hierarchy.30 academies will achieve the Eco Schools green flag award this year (2023-24) and students will feel they can have genuine impact in contributing to sustainability within their academy
In 2022-23 eight of our academies achieved the Eco Schools green flag, some with merit and distinction which is an incredible achievement we are really proud of! This year we are being extremely ambitious and are hoping that 30 academies can reach this goal. Key to achieving this is the involvement of pupils and students across our academies as eco teams or eco warriors and as part of it they should feel they have been able to genuinely make a positive difference to environmental sustainability within their academy.

• Working with Eden, we have installed 4419 solar panels across 13 of our sites so far, with one more academy due to receive 845 solar panels this Easter (2023). By installing these systems we are generating renewable electricity which helps directly reduce our carbon footprint, energy bills and equips our academies with real life data to use in teaching. We are currently in the planning stage for Phase 2, to install more solar panels on more academy roofs.
• As of November 2022, all our academies we supply energy to are using 100% renewable electricity. SmartestEnergy supply this through our contract with Zenergi. This switch is an important step in our journey towards Net Zero as there are zero emissions associated with this type of energy consumption.
• Since the introduction of Oasis Horizons in 2020, we have deployed 34,520 iPads to all of our students and staff across the Trust. In the first few months of the 2021/22 academic year, we have saved 240 trees in paper and the amount of energy equivalent to running 304 residential fridges through natural reductions of printing. The iPads also have a much lower power consumption than desktop computers, which will continue to reduce our energy consumption significantly.
• At the end of 2022 our energy partner, Zenergi, visited 11 of our academies to perform an in depth energy audit of our buildings and the behaviours of those that use them. We are now reviewing the findings of these to make sure we are increasing their energy efficiency and lowering our carbon footprint as a result. Some of the changes we will need to make are around our buildings like insulation and window replacements, others are around our behaviours like ensuring our heating is only on when we need it and ensuring all equipment is switched off out of school hours. These changes will take time, but bit by bit we can make a huge difference.
• We have almost completed switching all of our lightbulbs to LEDs in all of our academies, in our one of our biggest strategic projects to date. This is a really valuable step in energy efficiency for our buildings and will save us significant money in electricity costs too.
• Some of our academies underwent a waste audits last year with Veolia to better understand how we can reduce our waste and increase our recycling rates towards becoming more circular. We are using these findings across all our academies to improve.
• Saving energy has been and continues to be a huge focus right, so as well as our LED project, our Eco-Champions continue to use the interactive Energy Sparks platform to reduce our consumption through behavioural change activities, for example all our academies now have ‘switch off’ stickers to encourage switching off unnecessary lights and appliances.
• We continue to use an environmental management system approach at Oasis to help to bring structure and governance to support our Net Zero goal and other environmental aims and ensure we are continually improving.

Energy Sparks is an interactive energy usage platform showing your schools’ daily gas, electricity and solar consumption, allowing you to compare to others schools and even compete against them for prizes. We are finding this particularly useful recently to see where we can save energy, the charts and lesson activity resources really help with this.

Transform Our World provides lots of teacher-tested resources and tools including workshops you can book.

Lets Go Zero - the national campaign supporting schools, parents and working with government to go Net Zero, they have competitions with partners (with great prizes for schools to win), action plan templates and webinar recordings

WWF provide resources including guides, measuring your own carbon footprint calculator and environmental-related careers information

Fairtrade Foundation. Sustainability is more than just protecting the environment and Fairtrade do some great lesson plans to tie in social and economic elements too. Their resources are split by different ages and themes and not all related to food!

UK Schools Sustainability Network (UKSSN) is a group of national and regional networks to share best practice and learn from others whether you’re a teacher, student or national/operational staff member. OCL have recently joined the operations group and are already finding the discussions and resources very useful.

We have created a few documents and templates ourselves to support our journey in improving environmental sustainability at Oasis.

• Environmental Checklist
• Legal Register
• Environmental Aspects and Impacts Register