Helping Others Protect the Environment

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.

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

We are pleased to have student members of the HOPE team write impassioned pieces 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. 

This year, the HOPE team have:

• Completed the Senior HOPE fashion exchange, sorting through clothes donated by students and selling them for 50p to raise money for the Rainforest Alliance. The exchange was so popular the team undertook another and sold to parents at the Christmas fair
• Assisted Pre-Prep in achieving Gold status with the Green Tree Schools Award
• Assisted Pre-Prep in making their garden more hedgehog friendly and installed a hedgehog house
• Delivered an assembly for World Wildlife Day, highlighting local and endemic species. Off the back of the assembly, wildflowers were planted outside the pool to increase biodiversity
• Held an Earth Day assembly on the planet vs plastics, a mufti day was also held to raise money for Surfers Against Sewage 
• Put together sustainability activities which could be shared with others; since January 2024 they have planted seeds, made bee houses out of upcycled tin cans, picked and pressed flowers which we turned into wooden coasters and bookmarks, made herb terrariums out of old milk bottles and made beeswax wraps

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.