Silver Certificate Ceremony

On Wednesday 25 January, The European School celebrated achieving the Eco-Schools Silver Award with a ceremony involving children from our Eco-Planet team and parents.

During the ceremony, we heard from our school mentor, Roel Opbroek and from Marine Cornelis, a European Climate Pact Ambassador and the Executive Director and founder at Next Energy Consumer. She explained that we all have superpowers: every little step that we take to helping the planet is successful and meaningful. Please see the attached video to view her message.

Message from the Eco-Planet Team:

Our eco journey at ESH Primary began with the formation of our Pupils’ Council in the 2018 – 2019 school year. As it was clear that protecting the environment and creating a sustainable school was important to the children, a new children’s group was born: The Eco-Planet Team. Beginning in February 2020, the Eco-Planet Team soon got to work in sharing the message across the school through initiatives such as reducing litter in the playground and through introducing different bins around the school so that we can separate our waste.

Although the disruptions of school lockdowns caused by Covid-19 did affect our progress, we were extremely pleased to be awarded the Bronze Award in June 2021.

Since then, while continuing the focus on separating waste, we launched a new initiative to reduce the amount of printing done across the school. The children set the teachers an impressive target of reducing printing by 25%. Even though we didn’t quite reach this target, between March 2021 and October 2022, we reduced our printing by 22%, a huge reduction of 158516 sheets of paper.

We are really proud of such school-wide achievements that led to us receiving the Silver Award in December 2022. Our next steps are to promote the issue of sustainability more widely in our lessons, making conscious links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This will all be done while continuing to focus on the initiatives already in place, and through a new focus on reducing energy and water consumption across our school.

All the steps that we have taken along our journey have been led by and promoted by the members of the Eco-Planet Team who meet monthly to discuss ideas, create posters and videos and share information with the school community.

We are now looking forward to taking the steps towards achieving Green Flag status.

The exploits of the Eco-Planet Team have also earned us an article on The Hague Online: https://www.thehagueonline.com/children/2023/02/02/european-primary-school-receives-eco-certificate