To celebrate the Queen's Platinum Anniversary our school was apart of the Queen's Green Canopy celebrations and gratefully received a tree to commemorate her reign. We had the pleasure of a Deputy Lieutenant of Hereford to help us plant our tree in our school sensory garden. Our ECO council perform a reading of a Poem called 'The Tree'.

Over the last two years, the ECO School Council at St Paul’s have been continuing their hard work in promoting a greener more environmentally friendly environment for our school and community.

Promoting healthy eating for snack times and lunchbox contents. The children felt that all pupils needed reminding to eat fruit and vegetables or a cereal/grain bar for break time snack as it is a healthier fuel for the body. They also reminded our school community that we are a nut free school and no nuts or foods containing nuts are allowed on site. This is a health and safety concern of the children regarding allergies.

Posters are displayed around the school reminding children and staff of requirements by the ECO council.

Our school takes part in Walk-to-School week every year which is run by the charity Living Streets. It is a fantastic way to encourage the children to walk, partly walk from a car, cycle, or scoot to school for a week. Resources and lesson plans are provided by Living Streets for teachers to use in lessons to further educate children on the benefits of walking to the school for themselves and for the environment. The children receive a reward sticker for each day which they add to their booklet. At the end of the week, each child that has completed this challenge receives a pin badge. This scheme has a positive impact on our children and encourages change to their travel to and from school.

Morrisons supermarket announced their offer of free gardening equipment for schools. Our parents and children were wonderful in collecting tokens for our school.

A total of 2285 grow tokens were collected and we chose some gardening equipment that would enable the ECO school council to grow some produce of their own and share with their classes. A water butt was also selected to allow our school to recycle rainwater to water our plants.

As a school we took part in the Switch off Fortnight campaign. This required everyone in our school to try and reduce the amount of electricity and electrical equipment used for that fortnight. ECO reps were very good at reminding class teachers to switch off their classroom’s lights, whiteboards and computers when leaving the classrooms. This reduced our usage dramatically. We feel that this campaign has encouraged change to our staff and children in simple ways to reduce usage.

During Parliament week our ECO council met for a discussion about Parliament and democracy. The council shared their thoughts about what they knew about parliament and what their jobs are.

We watched a video on Parliament and the Government which gave us more of an understanding. We then chose a topic for discussion and that topic was Homelessness. Our ECO council felt very strongly about this topic, especially as we were entering the season of winter and their concerns were for people living on streets in the cold weather with no shelter or food. We discussed what more could be done to support the homeless and ways to prevent more people becoming homeless.

The ECO reps wanted to donate some foods from our food banks to homeless shelters and ask for donations of blankets and sleeping bags. They felt that the cost of living was increasing homelessness and they wanted to ask the Prime Minster to reduce the cost of food and housing so more people could have their own homes. Also, for more homeless shelters to be built around the country.

Herefordshire Council were offering travel grants to supply a school with either a bike or scooter shelter. The ECO reps felt that a scooter shelter is very much needed to house many scooters that children travel to school on and play with at playtimes. In the past the scooters have been stored in classrooms, causing obstructions.

After submitting our application, we were successful and were granted £3000 towards our scooter shelter project.

We look forward to more children being able to travel to school on their scooters daily and for them to be stored safely during the school day.