Haimo Primary School, Eltham

Challenge:

Air pollution affects your body in lots of ways and is the largest environmental health risk we face today.

This Clean Air for Schools Vision outlines what would need to happen both outside the school and inside the school to reduce air pollution for pupils and staff. The actions illustrated in the vision are taken from the Clean Air for Schools Framework.

The student voice has the power to create real change. The Y5/6 Double G (SDGs) and Rights Respecting Committee members of Haimo Primary School were challenged to use their voices, and their creativity, to share their knowledge of solutions to air pollution with key decision-makers to take their first steps in becoming a Clean Air School!

Action:

Using the Clean Air Vision resources the students first played a matching pairs game in small groups of 3 or 4 to identify the causes and solutions of air pollution, both indoors and outdoors. This activity led to some interesting discussions around the interactions between different causes and solutions, and how some solutions address more than one cause of air pollution. They learned about new solutions and added these to their clean air action plan!

Next, they explored the Clean Air for Schools Vision to look for inspiration for creating their Clean Air School.

You can see them at work here. Here is one of their excellent Clean Air Schools!

Outcome:

The students really enjoyed the design element of creating a vision of a Clean Air School and were able to include many of their own school features, as well as some new ideas, and linked it back to the Clean Air for Schools Framework actions.

They also enjoyed having time to talk about solutions and were proud that they had already worked on some projects in the past that meant their school was well on the way to being a Clean Air School, whilst recognising the potential for further impact!

The teacher who ran the session will be taking this work further by engaging the other Double G and Rights Respecting committee members in the other year groups in creating a 3D models of a Clean Air School (using junk materials). We look forward to seeing these soon!

Getting started…

Use the Clean Air Vision resources, where students will use their voices, and their creativity, to share their knowledge of solutions to air pollution with key decision-makers.

This session was run during the Youth Climate Summit on 10th November. You can watch this session here: