Get, Set, GO! Sustainability: A step-by-step guide to creating a sustainable early years setting

By Anthony David

Get Set GO! Sustainability covers a wide range of sustainable options that Children's Centres and early years setting can pick up and start with. Ithis book is aimed at those who are new to sustainability and those who are looking to enhance their sustainable status with some new ideas. Set out in an accessible style, you can dip into the book at any page, as each page is set out in a range of helpful headings to get you going as soon as possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Allen Group
• Release date: Oct 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781909101128

Anthony David

Anthony David is head of psychiatry at the renowned Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London and a practising clinician at the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospitals, South London, the country’s leading psychiatric institution. He is also the director and Sackler Chair of the UCL Institute of Mental Health. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed articles and is editor of the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. He also wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of R D Laing's The Divided Self.

Book preview

First Steps To Sustainability

The chances are that you are already involved in some sort of green project. However taking those next steps can be as anxious as the first ones. It is important to consider the wider picture, which will help you to pace any change, and therefore allow any projects to embed. Having read this book there will be ideas that have appealed more than others. Those are the ones to start with. Having said that, make a list of those other projects that you think your centre could support on the back cover of this book. Those back cover ideas may well be the ones that form the heart of your action plan in the future.

Ideas and activities

Choose an aspect of sustainability that you want to lead on. The 8 doorways (pages 14-15) will help you decide what area to focus on. When starting out always choose something that you are interested in. You may be a keen gardener and have already begun developments to your growing spaces so making further sustainable adaptations would be a simple step to take.

Use the skills of your staff and families. Sustainability cannot be achieved by one person alone, it requires everybody within your community to be involved. You might want to convene as a formal team or start less formally. This will be up to you but certainly record your action as it is likely that you can use it as evidence later for awards or funding bids.

Take time to look at your site and community with fresh eyes. A walk round your site (both inside and out) with a focus on how can this be a more sustainable environment? can be quite revealing and may help you towards creating your first action plan.

Be realistic with what you can achieve. There are some quick wins, such as installing recycling bins, that will encourage your team towards more challenging tasks but at the end of the day you will still have a nursery to run and all the complications that involves. It is better to focus on fewer targets and do them well rather than to fail to complete a broader range.

Take time to review your achievements and celebrate them with your families. As they are part of this project they will expect a certain amount of communication on progress or success.

Reflection points

When you are considering what area(s) to focus on consider what resources you have available. You might have a proactive Local Authority travel advisor who is able to support any travel schemes you are considering. Equally there may be an area of expertise that you have personally. Start with what you feel you can resource. It is worth having a long-term vision in mind with a number of environmental milestones set over two or three years. By establishing a culture of environmental sustainability within your centre you can go on to build on it further over the coming years.

Websites & publications

www.eco-schools.org.uk/links – this link will take you to the Eco-Schools resources page which has a useful downloadable action plan template.

Words of advice

Your sustainable projects need to be sustainable themselves. You may well have a current eco champion in your setting but what do you do if they leave or are unable to continue this role as a result of other commitments? This is important to consider if you want your sustainability plans to continue into the future over a period of years rather than months. A universal action plan or commitment through your vision will tie you to your green agenda so that should there be personnel changes your nursery or centre is in a position to honour its green promises.

Next steps

OK. You’ve read the book and you’re fired up and ready to

go! Enthusiasm is a key ingredient to making change happen and you may well be at the heart of that change, certainly to start with. There will be hurdles that will cause you to adjust your thinking or actions, but this is not a bad thing as it will

test the quality of your plans. Ultimately it is something that most parents and children will support, which means that ultimately you will be successful if you keep going. Arguably, there is no greater cause at the moment than sustainability,

so be the champion!

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Focus on fewer targets, such as introducing recycling bins and starting to grow your own produce, and do them well rather than fail to complete a broader range

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Secret Tips

Celebrating success is really important, particularly as this will most likely have involved a large section of your community. To give the success the best possible public profile contact your local paper. Sustainability is an interesting subject, and when it’s coupled with an educational setting such as a nursery or Children’s Centre it becomes a newsworthy topic. Make sure you get parental permission for any photographs taken.

In your first few months of sustainable work you will make mistakes. That’s absolutely fine. The key thing is to start. Lessons can be learnt as you go along. Your first growing season might not yield the tomato crop that you were hoping for but by the second season you will have learnt a lot about how often to water, where to locate and how to tend to your plants. Because sustainability is still a relatively new idea it is often a case of giving an idea a go - then you can become an expert and share your advice with other centres.

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Biodiversity

Creating larger urban environments and dramatic changes to farming practices have had an impact on our local biodiversity. This term, bio-diversity, refers to the range of habitats available within one location. Taken on a country-wide scale you would expect to see a broad diversity of habitats in order to accommodate our broad range of species of plants and animals. Whilst you might consider your own grounds to be just a small patch there are a number of relatively low cost adaptations that you can make to increase your centre’s diversity and offer valuable new