Case Study 4 - Staffordshire County Council

Staffordshire County Council has a very good record of integrating environmental management across its different departments. It began in the early 1990s (before the Rio Earth Summit) when an environmental officer in the Planning Department decided to establish a cross-departmental environmental group. She was able to do this because she was of senior officer grade, and number three in the Planning department. The group consisted of eight people, all self-selected for their existing environmental enthusiasm. A timetable of regular meetings allowed this group to consider environmental issues and developments as they arose, and to reflect on how each of their departments might respond to these issues. The cross-departmental group decided early on that its role could be enhanced, and the place of the environment on the agenda raised, if there was a non-county council environmental forum, made up of representatives of other sectors of the community. An Environmental Forum was soon established by the county with external representation from (amongst others) local businesses, local radio, the voluntary sector and the community health council.

Following the Earth Summit conference in 1992, local government across the UK took a lead in developing Local Agenda 21, and Staffordshire was quick to adopt a Local Agenda 21 process using the Environmental Forum that it had already established. During the period 1994 to 1996 it encouraged the establishment of many Special Working Groups to represent different interest groups in the county-wide community and examine the potential impact of sustainability on their sectors.

In the Education department the cross-departmental officer was also the Adviser for Environmental Education, Derrick Golland. Derrick had been working on plans and policies that would place greater emphasis on environmental education and education for sustainability in Staffordshire schools. Almost every school in the county already had a member of staff with formal responsibility for environmental education. Derrick's plan was to use this network to prioritise and then implement policies such as:

• Developing school grounds for greater biodiversity and better play provision;
• Creating an environmental accreditation scheme for schools.

Each of the County Council Service Committees was asked to endorse the Local Agenda 21 ideas that were being promoted in their service departments. This resulted in the prioritised list of plans and policies, which Derrick and his environmental education co-ordinators had drawn up, being adopted as policy by the Education Committee. Only a short while later, in the early part of 1994, Derrick saw an article seeking schools interested in participating in a new environmental award scheme - Eco-Schools. He recognised this as a suitable environmental accreditation scheme and approached the UK managers - the Tidy Britain Group - to offer two schools in each of the District Councils within Staffordshire for the pilot scheme. The involvement of District Councils was intentional; they dealt with local environmental issues such as refuse collection, local recycling schemes and traffic issues whilst the County was responsible for education plus waste disposal and broader planning issues.

Headteachers and governors from selected schools were invited to carefully planned presentations at which representatives from the County, Tidy Britain and the District outlined the plan and the support they could each offer the schools. This approach, right from the outset, helped build bridges between the County Council and the District Councils, and indicated to the schools that this was a serious and significant development that was being offered to them.

By late 1999 there were 28 schools in the county (including Stoke-on-Trent) that had received the Eco-Schools Award, and a further 110 were registered with the Eco-Schools programme and were working towards the Award. Co-ordinators from each participating school have the opportunity to attend two in-service training sessions per year. These sessions allow them to compare notes and ideas, and learn of new initiatives being made available by government departments or NGOs, as well as providing an opportunity for discussion of the broader aspects of sustainability which might not otherwise arise.

The new Education Development Plan for Staffordshire now gives a specific role to the Eco-Schools Scheme, and schools have an intrinsic part to play in the County's 'Environmental Policy', rather than having a separate policy for environmental education. The significance of this is that environment moves from a cross-curricular theme to a policy that embraces the whole school community. Derrick sees the current emphasis on literacy and numeracy as good for the whole school approach to environment. Learning from a real and relevant context should help to engage more of the pupils, and there are plenty of opportunities to, for example, use number and write reports, when studying a school's environmental performance and planning ways of improving it. He believes that good environmental management of a school should be apparent in the educational performance of the school.

For the future, Derrick hopes to see more support of initiatives like Eco-Schools from the DfEE, not just the DETR. Perhaps the new emphasis on sustainability in the revised National Curriculum is the first step in greater valuing of environment by the educational establishment.

Taken from "Greening Britain's Schools".

	View the Greening Britain's Schools Sustainability Study
	The study can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is free to download from the Adobe web site.