Environmental Education at Stringer
Dorothy Stringer School has a reputation for excellence in environmental education, one which has taken a long time to build. When Rob Sandercock and Dr Dan Danahar joined the school over a decade ago, the school was already a well-established eco school; the only secondary school to achieve this distinction in Brighton and Hove at that time. Much of that achievement was due to the vision, drive and determination of Sue Middleton, who had worked tirelessly to initiate and establish the eco school status.
The eco schools philosophy dictates a sustainable approach to school management that is based on democratic ideals. It makes participation for all members of the school community a fully inclusive experience. With this system in place, it was easy for Rob and Dan to start work in earnest when they both arrived at the beginning of the millennium. Rob explained, "Having recently returned from several years of travel, I knew that I was ready to put down my roots and then Brighton turned up on my horizon, it was perfect." Dan said, "I'd spent 15 years in academia and it was clear to me that if I wanted to achieve anything beyond a list of scientific papers, I would need to work within a community that connected directly with the citizens of Brighton & Hove. I knew within a very short time that Dorothy Stringer was the place where I could make a significant contribution."
So with the eco schools system in place, this unlikely pair formed their partnership when they became the school's environmental coordinators in 2001. "If I knew then, just how much we would achieve over the next ten years, I would never have believed it; I simply lose track of the many projects we have been involved with," remarked Rob.
Early in their work at Dorothy Stringer, the pair was seemingly obsessed with taking pupils on field trips. Dan said, "My golden rule has always been that if you want the children to learn, you need to get them out of the classroom." And so field trips on fossils and chalk, ecology and wildlife management, as well as sustainable living and alternative energy became the norm. Between the two of them, they took hundreds of pupils to all kinds of different sites within the UK and beyond. However, it was in 2004-2005 that Rob and Dan applied on the school's behalf and won the Franco British Council's Environmental Award. This enabled a series of environmental exchanges with our colleagues in Le Havre, France.
Simultaneously the pair had been encouraging voluntary work for parents, teachers, staff and governors to help renovate a derelict building within the school's woodlands that later became the Brian Foster Environment Centre. Rob said, "Those early days were full of promise and enthusiasm. The Brian Foster Environment Centre was our first tangible educational resource." But they soon started to develop other assets on site. Dan explained, "We began to realise that, as well as being educational resources, the management of the woodland and later the construction of the wildlife pond also made significant contributions to the conservation of local wildlife. Only recently a local ecologist came to visit the Butterfly Haven and, on seeing the whole mosaic of habitat types here at Stringer, he suggested that we apply for Local Nature Reserve status. This is astounding considering where we started. The bird life, butterflies and wildflowers are all much more abundant and more diverse than when we first started."
Over time, Rob made extraordinary efforts to refit the environment centre with alternative technology, to demonstrate how this could be done in domestic housing. "I had the single brick walls insulated with all kinds of things: corks, dog fur, sheep's wool and human hair. The human hair was fun; we had a sponsored haircut so that people could donate their hair, the children just loved it."
In 2009 it was decided that both Rob and Dan would take on new roles within the school. Rob would become the school's Sustainability Coordinator and Dan the Biodiversity Coordinator. He said, "We wanted people to understand that it was all very well living a sustainable lifestyle but unless you understood why we needed to do this, that if we allow biodiversity loss to continue, we would damage, perhaps beyond repair, the ecosystems we rely on for the invisible services they provide." Dan added, "So biodiversity and sustainability are simply the two sides of the same coin."
Rob, determined to give the pupils a full understanding of what this meant in practice, supervised the installation of solar thermal panels to provide the centre with hot water, a light hole and photovoltaic rays to generate electricity. In addition, the pair managed to have a range of different glazing systems built into the centre, to demonstrate how the efficiency of single, double and triple glazing would affect insulation.
During 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, building on a wealth of experience putting on different events to raise the pupils' awareness of the natural world, Dan worked on behalf of the school, in partnership with a range of different wildlife organisations, to promote Brighton and Hove’s Big Nature a concept he had thought up in 2009. He said, "We slowly began to recognise that our objective should be to move towards a common understanding of the value of our local environment and that this should not be restricted to just us but to the entire city."
In 2006 both Rob and Dan shared the first ever "Green Teacher" award in Brighton and Hove, an honor that thrilled them both, and later in 2010 Dan was awarded the first ever Brighton and Hove’s Chief Executive's Award for his contribution to urban nature conservation. He said, "Although we have had the luxury of working on an environmental project for over ten years now and we could not begin to give you all the details of the many projects we have been involved with, one thing is clear to us, it would not have been possible without the support of so many other people that get left unmentioned, like for instance my wife."
With so much achieved in ten years, what will the future bring? They both said in unison, "Watch this space".
*****
Dorothy Stringer has been an Eco School for many years. The school has been involved in a number of schemes which have helped the local and school environments as well as having an impact in the classroom.
The Eco Schools process is holistic. It works by involving the whole school (students, teachers, non-teaching staff and governors) together with members of the local community (parents, the local authority, the media and local businesses). It encourages teamwork and helps to create a shared understanding of what it takes to run a school in a way that respects and enhances the environment.
Eco Schools is much more than an environmental management system for schools. It is a programme for promoting environmental awareness in a way that links to many curriculum subjects, including citizenship, personal, social and health education (PSHE) and education for sustainable development.
Dorothy Stringer Environmental Partnership
The DSEP all began when a small group of us got together to conserve the woodland on our campus and because we started talking to a range of interested parties beyond the school community, we decided to call ourselves the Dorothy Stringer Woodland Partnership. However, it soon became clear that the areas of our interest were expanding and so the school and broader community formed the Dorothy Stringer Environmental Partnership (DSEP). This was finally ratified at our last Eco-schools committee meeting.
The DSEP acts as an umbrella organization that represents and coordinates the activities of the Eco-School Committee (ESC) and the Environment and Ecology Club (EEC) and it deals with local and national organizations (e.g. the Sussex Wildlife Trust, Natural England, The British Trust for Conservation Volunteers and The RiverOcean Foundation etc.)
The ESC is composed of students, teachers, governors and members of the local community and is primarily responsible for the discussion and decision making process concerning the schools different environmental projects.
The EEC encourages enthusiasm and an interest in Natural History, Ecological and Environmental issues amongst the students. It is through this group that the majority of practical work is done, e.g. fund raising, recycling, woodland management and research activities.
The Dorothy Stringer Environmental Partnership
Loder Road
Brighton
BN1 6PZ