Helping Others Protect the Environment

Our story

The Helping Others Protect the Environment (HOPE) team was set up in 2019 to help channel the students’ interest in creating a more sustainable future. In line with this theme, our name stands for Helping Others Protect the Environment, a message which we believe encapsulates our view of aiding our local community, in and outside of school, to understand the importance of protecting our planet, not only for ourselves but for generations to come.

The logo was designed by a student and represents the protection of the planet. The leaves symbolise all living things and the Red Kite is a success story of what we can achieve. These birds were close to extinction, but after some investment and support, their numbers are improving especially around our school.

Pipers is the first school in the country to have an Environmentalist in Residence, a role occupied by Phil Williams, a former BBC Education television presenter and The Green Organisation International Sustainability Ambassador, who has been instrumental in supporting the HOPE team. Mr Williams' experience in leading environmental issues and working with other schools, allows Pipers Corner to be at the forefront of taking responsibility for how our actions have the power to affect the world around us. Along with the actions we’ve taken to improve our ecological impact, we’ve created a logo which we believe encapsulates our belief in the importance of protecting our local wildlife and that the environmental changes we make will not only affect us, but will help to make a difference globally.

Student Articles

Every term, a student member of the HOPE team writes an impassioned piece about the affects of climate change. Click on the dropdowns below to read the full articles. 

Eco Pledge

Our pledge for this academic year is to reduce the use of single use plastics and to raise awareness of the damaging effects of the fast fashion industry, as well as to think more about what we’re wasting, notably paper and food waste. Overall, we wish to educate students, their families and the wider school community about the consumer power we all have and how we can use that to make positive and necessary changes.

Our current plans

HOPE includes students, parents and staff members from across the whole school, and different year groups have been focusing on different environmental issues, organising events for their year group that they believe will have the most beneficial impact. 

The Pre-Prep team has been instrumental in taking initiative to make real environmental change, having been awarded the National Eco Schools Green Flag.

Year 7 and 8 have been working towards an Eco-Fashion Show, involving the Textile Department and harnessing the creative imagination of students to create fashion pieces which encourage the purchase of long lasting, sustainable clothing. The HOPE Year 7 and 8 team aim to inspire their peers to make their own clothing and to think more carefully about how their choices affect the environment. 

Year 9 have been spending this year thinking about water and its relation and importance in our global ecosystem, which links to the Year 10 teams work writing an article to be published in the Rainforest Concern Magazine. 

Further up in the school, HOPE members have been thinking about how they can encourage their peers to think more about fast fashion and how it not only influences the environment but also the people forced to work to manufacture this clothing, hosting virtual presentations detailing information on this topic and alternatives to contributing to this industry.

In the new year we will be running Litter, Paper and energy monitoring schemes.

What we’ve done so far

School Audit

In school over the last year, the HOPE team has been trying to raise awareness of our group and of the issues we think are important. We started by doing an audit of the school’s environmental impact, where students researched aspects such as electricity usage, recycling process and how we’re protecting the wildlife.

From this, we’ve been able to identify which areas of the school we need to focus on the most and have been able to implement changes to help reduce paper waste.

We are promoting a change in attitude that recycling only reaches full potential if it comes behind REDUCE and REUSE

Green Week

We ran an Environmental pledge scheme where we asked families with links to the school to make one pledge to make an improvement at home. We were positively surprised by the wonderful take up of the challenge. Since 2019 we have been running an annual ' Green Week', where we host environmental workshops for students from our school and other local schools. We hold days of awareness where we aim to reduce energy consumption across a number of areas at School such as paper usage, promoting the use of natural light and innovative ideas suggested by students such as 'Swap Shops' to promote sustainable fashion. During the inaugural Green Week we raised over £900 which we donated to Rainforest Concern; this was enough to sponsor the protection of 18 acres of tropical rainforest and was the biggest single donation to the charity by any school in the UK that year. More recently, members of HOPE have attended virtual lectures- most notably a talk on the impact of plastic waste in our oceans, organised by The Guardian- which have generated more ideas and discussions about how we can change our environmental impact for the better.

The vast majority of HOPE’s events, projects and assemblies involve students from Pre-Prep all the way up to Year 12 and 13, as we believe that the only way to leave a positive environmental legacy is to fully involve everyone in the community.

Thank you for taking the time to read about our environment group and our projects. We look forward to working with as many members of the Pipers Community in our efforts to protect our planet. 

The HOPE team.