Hucknall pupils promoting the green message with new eco-council scheme

Earlier this month, pupils at Holgate Primary & Nursery School joined forces with the Hucknall Wombles for a launch litter pick on the land surrounding the school site.

Children from school donned their hi-vis vests, picked up their bin bags and grabbers and collected 10 bags of rubbish.

Matt Williams from the Wombles, said: “Although we collected 10 bags, there is still more to collect and we hope to be able to come up again and make this a regular Womble spot.”

The school scheme is being led by site manager Alex Walker, together with the senior management team at the school, and he was delighted at how environmentally-aware the pupils were.

He said: “Now, more than ever, we need to educate children in environmental concerns, it’s for their children and their children’s children and if we don’t something early on then bad habits form, so we need to educate them now to make small impacts which will lead to larger impacts down the line.

"We’re based on a busy footfall site between our school and the secondary school and we looked at how much litter was collected and what sort of litter and whether that can be recycled.

“The kids really enjoyed it and some of the comments we were getting from them as to why we are doing these things took me aback a bit, they were a lot more aware of the bigger picture than I thought they might be.

“Some were thinking about making the school area nicer but other were talking about the impact of plastic rubbish and what effect that has on the environment and wildlife, they were really clued in.”

The eco-council currently features pupils from years 3-6 but the council will be engaging with everyone in the school so the young year groups can all get involved too with youngsters in foundation stage doing forest schools and growing plants, all they way to year 6 pupils visiting a recycling plant and seeing what happens to waste materials.

The school also has a garden area promoting the green message and its next event is getting everyone in the community involved with litter picking in the coming weeks.