If you’re reading this, you probably already understand how important sustainability is - especially in the early years. Early years educators play a crucial role in helping children form positive habits that shape lifelong behaviour, including habits for sustainable living such as looking after wildlife, recycling rainwater, separating our waste, litter-picking, and so much more. Children will inherit the world we are shaping right now, and it’s the responsibility of every one of us, in nurseries and beyond, to do our part in making that world better.

You might already have a range of sustainability initiatives in place, with more you’d love to introduce, which is fantastic. Or you might be right at the beginning of your sustainability journey, which is also great. Wherever you are starting from, a Climate Action Plan (CAP) can be a very useful tool to help you progress. A CAP helps you embed sustainability into every part of your setting, because sustainability shouldn’t be an ‘add-on’ or a ‘nice to have’ – it should be woven throughout high quality early-years practice. Once you have a CAP in place, it becomes an anchor for continuous improvement towards sustainability. It sets out achievable goals in a visual format, where you’re able to decide on priorities. The plan will (and should) evolve as time goes on, helping you drive real, positive changes.

 

The Department for Education whose sustainability and climate change strategy states that all education settings should have a nominated sustainability lead and a Climate Action Plan in place, provide a lot of guidance about CAPs. This includes tools from ‘Sustainability for Education’, ‘Climate Ambassador Programme’ (who can pair you with a volunteer climate ambassador who can directly support the development and the delivery of your plan) and ‘The National Education Nature Park’. These are well worth exploring before or while you develop your CAP. The DfE does not provide a set template for CAPs because the whole point is that you have flexibility to develop a plan that is tailored specifically to your setting. The only requirement is that your CAP addresses the following four pillars:

• Biodiversity: efforts to protect and enhance nature and wildlife within the setting and its surroundings
• Climate Education and Green Skills: how learners (children and staff) are supported to understand climate change, sustainability, and develop relevant skills
• Decarbonisation: actions to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, working towards net zero
• Adaptation and Resilience: how the setting is preparing for and responding to the impacts of climate change

These four pillars are a useful way to help you group different actions together to realise their impact. For example, reducing food waste, water usage and re-using resources all help to reduce carbon footprint (i.e. working towards the decarbonisation pillar). Similarly, creating bird boxes, a small wildlife pond and banning the use of plastic glitter, all work towards protecting and potentially increasing biodiversity.

Within your CAP, you could have the following areas:

A baseline assessment/your journey so far – in our CAPs we’ve outlined key areas of sustainability, linked each one to a pillar and then noted what we already have in place - but you can choose any format that works for you, as long as it’s clear how your actions relate to each pillar. By detailing this section, you get the opportunity to reflect and celebrate your progress so far!

Targets/goals – you can group these by short-term (e.g. to be achieved within 1-2 years) and long-term (e.g. to be achieved within 5-10 years), or you can expand this by having medium-term goals.

In our CAPs, the above is quite comprehensive. We try to capture everything we can think of that would improve our sustainability. But to avoid this becoming overwhelming, we then have a separate table (mostly just a one-pager), at the end of the CAP which selects five or so priority goals just for the year ahead. These are broken down by:

• Actions needed to achieve the goal
• Timescale to complete
• Resources required
• People to involve
• Measure of success
• Progress tracker
• Quarterly review dates

Across our 18 nurseries, we are currently in the process of consolidating the CAPs, by choosing the priority areas for this year – as well as starting conversations with the relevant people who are key for the implementation of those actions. A CAP shows how sustainability requires a team effort and it should not be the responsibility of just one or a couple of people in your setting.

Remember the intent with having the CAP is to have something that actually helps you turn many different ideas, into manageable steps that you can clearly follow and stay on track with. Think carefully about creating a CAP that you will find easy to regularly review and use, and ensure that it can be easily understood by all of your colleagues and families too.

If you’d like to bounce some ideas around, or if you’d like me to share a template of our CAP, feel free to get in touch: [email protected]