Eco-Schools is the world’s largest, pupil-led, environmental education program, empowering young people to drive sustainability through a structured seven-step framework. It encourages schools to tackle issues like energy, waste, and biodiversity, with successful schools earning the internationally recognised Green Flag award.  

To find out more information about Eco Schools, CLICK HERE.

At Yew Tree Primary school we are proud to share that we have been awarded the Eco-School's Green Flag for the fifth year running.  In 2026, we achieved the Green Flag with Merit based on the feedback below:

How do we achieve the award?

• The Seven Steps: Schools follow a structured, seven-step framework—including forming a committee, conducting a review, and creating action plans—to embed sustainability into school life.
• Themed Topics: Schools choose from topics like Biodiversity, Climate Change, Energy, Litter, Marine, School Grounds, Transport, Waste, and Water.
• Green Flag Award: This prestigious, annual accreditation is awarded to schools that demonstrate a high commitment to environmental excellence.

Our Eco Council Work

We have meetings every half term. Have look here at what we do in them...

Our Eco School Councillors have been learning about the impact of food waste on the environment and on our school. They have though of ways they can help reduce food waste at our school and how they can encourage their peers to reduce food waste too. They designed posters and fed back to their class what they had done!

As part of our Eco School's Award application we have to fill in a questionnaire. Today we looked at the sections on litter and biodiversity - we went around the school grounds to help us answer the questions.

What else do we do?

Have a look at the things we do as being part of the Eco Council Team!

Our Eco Tidy A/B/C Class teams support Mr Blewitt in ensuring the all the paper bins in the school are emptied twice a week so that we make sure we are recycling paper at Yew Tree!

We have separate food bins for food waste. Our EYFS and KS1 classes also have food caddies in their classrooms  where they can put their food waste then the Eco Councillors empty them into the food waste bins so that our food waste at Yew Tree can be disposed of properly. There is food caddy in the staff room for our teachers to use too!

We recycle batteries here at Yew Tree! 

Why it is important to recycle batteries.......

Preventing Pollution - Batteries contain hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and lithium that can leak into the soil and water from landfills, contaminating ecosystems and potentially entering the food chain. 

Reducing Landfill - Battery recycling diverts toxic and hazardous waste from landfills, reducing the overall burden on municipal waste systems. Batteries take over 100 years for a battery to decompose.

Saving Energy - It takes less energy to recycle and reprocess old batteries than it does to mine and extract new materials and manufacture new batteries. 

So please save any old batteries, give them to your your child to bring in and we will do the rest!

One of Eco Councillors brought old batteries from home into school to recycle.

Gardening Club

At Yew Tree we also run a gardening club. It's lots of fun. Have a look here at some of the things we do!

We re-used plastic bottles to make bird feeders and hung them in our school grounds to encourage birds to come. 

We deadhead the plants. This will help the new plants start to grow during spring and summer. We are saving the lavender for something special...

We also tidied the poly tunnel and planted some radishes.

We dried out the lavender that we collected last week and used it to make a lavender bags to take home.

We watered the radishes, planted chives in pots and topped up the bird feeders.

We planted white and red onions.

We re-potted some of the plants we got through our nature grant.

Single Use Plastics

From 1st October 2023, the Government will ban the sell of certain Single Use Plastics (SUPs). To find out more about this, you can click the image below

As an Eco-School, we will actively discourage the use of any single use plastics in school. This means we ask for your support in sending children into school with refillable water bottles rather than those provided in SUP packaging.