PROSPERE NEWS COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER
HALF TERM 3
2022 - 2023
Dear members of our Trust community, We are proud of the way that our staff and our students across the Trust have risen to the challenges of addressing the issues of sustainability and reduction of our carbon consumption. This has been a focus at Trust and School level and also for every individual involved within our Trust. The children and young people in our schools have been very influential at school level in affecting this change. All schools have sustainability action plans and the evidence of these actions is here to see in the school contributions throughout this newsletter. This focus will be ongoing over the next few years with a key area for future action being a review of our procurement processes looking through the lens of sustainability. By actively reviewing our procurement choices we can make significant reductions to our long-term carbon footprint and use our considerable leverage to ensure that our suppliers and providers take positive steps to reduce their own impact. Linda Jones, Chief Executive Officer Dave Bell, Executive Headteacher Andy Park, Executive Headteacher
SUSTAINABILITY FOCUS The Trust has made significant progress in implementing a range of sustainability / carbon reduction programmes across its schools. These have been driven by a range of high-profile Trust Initiatives, details of which can be found below, as well as a wealth of school-based initiatives involving students. Lighting Programme The estates team have been working to convert all our sites to LED and sensor controlled lighting to help reduce electricity usage. In the vast majority of schools, the replacement programme has taken into account all external lighting. We now have the issue of Astroturf floodlights to consider and are piloting this replacement at CHS. Roofing Replacement Programme: The aim of the programme is to replace all poor-quality roofing across schools in the Trust which will make all sites water tight and avoid an unacceptable heating loss. This programme is under way and will continue into the Summer term. Energy Consumption Mapping: We now have analysed energy bills for all schools over the 21/22 academic year and have a detailed spreadsheet covering how much energy has been used in what period throughout the year. We are now using this information to compare the energy use across the current academic year and initial results are pleasing showing a reduction in energy use across most schools. Catering Efficiency Our catering team have implemented changes to make their service more environmentally friendly with their ‘serving up sustainability’ project covering three key areas: 1 Helping the environment ‘Sustainable Eating.’ 2 Food Waste Costing The Earth 3 Healthy Eating and Cooking For the spring term, the focus in on area 3, the aim will be to develop alternative cooking methods that reduce energy consumption and continue to produce healthy balanced meals. Finance The implementation of a new invoice matching system has significantly reduced printing requirements, saving energy and resources. We are also asking staff to consider at how they place orders, encouraging larger, less frequent orders which would contribute to the reduction of waste packaging and transport pollution, rather than low volume, low quantity order which are neither economical nor eco-friendly.