Sustainability

School Garden

We are very fortunate to have a beautiful school garden here at St. Ambrose Barlow school. We currently run an after school club, with Mrs McGrory, as well as having groups of children gardening at lunchtimes with Mrs Fayaz. As a school, we make regular use of the garden, we often undertake different lessons outside as well as participating in class prayer services outdoor in the garden.  We also hold our annual Year 6 leavers Mass here in the garden in the Summer term.

After School Gardening Club

Saint Ambrose Barlow Bloomers, are a group of pupils who meet every week after school to help care for and further develop our school garden.

We undertake a range of activities each week aimed at developing our gardening skills and knowledge of plants as well as helping to develop teamwork skills whilst helping to care for local wildlife. It is also beneficial for our personal and social development, too, as connecting to nature is a great mood booster.

The club also helps raise awareness of environmental issues and we are keen to garden sustainably. We compost our own fruit peelings from break times, we grow our own fruit and vegetables and cook with the produce we have grown or share it with our community. In 2025, we fundraised to update our existing school pond. We hope to renew the pond liner and to install a solar powered pump to create a haven for wildlife and help us learn more about biodiversity.

Growing Fruit and Vegetables

We are really fortunate to have existing apple trees in our garden; we harvest our apples then cook with them. In 2025, we baked delicious apple biscuits.

We share whatever we grow with others as well as seed harvesting, this way we are ensuring we can continue to grow these crops in our garden next year. By harvesting some seeds, we are also helping to cut our carbon footprint as we are being less reliant on packaged, transported seeds. It is also helping us to be more self-sufficient and cost effective as these seeds are free.

Bugs and Birds

Our school garden has a bug hotel which we maintain and we regularly top up our bird table and bird feeders with bird seed to help encourage birds into our garden.

In January 2026, we participated in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch and have participated in a variety of challenges to gain our Ruby Robin Award. These activities included researching local birds we might see or hear in our garden, making bird themed cards to raise awareness of caring for and feeding our birds, making seed ball to help feed our birds in these colder, winter months and undertaking a bird watch outside gathering data to see which birds are our most frequent visitors.

Working with Others

Each term,  we invite parents and friends to come and support us in the garden. This is a great way to all work together and enjoy our garden as well as getting to know others and have fun outside.

In Spring term 2026 we were busy making seed bombs, which we shared with others schools. By creating and sharing these seed bombs with others, we are hoping to encourage them to throw these onto verges, borders or small patches of land and let these wild flowers grow, as these flowers are important for local pollinators and wild life.

Garden Club Gallery

Eco Council

In 2025/26 St. Ambrose Barlow Catholic Primary School formed an Eco Council to help pupils take an active role in promoting sustainability across the school.

Each Year group elected two pupils to be on our Eco Council. Members of the Eco council work together to raise awareness, reduce waste, save energy and encourage environmentally responsible choices through campaigns, projects and everyday actions to make our school greener and more sustainable.

What have the Eco Council done so far?

The Eco Council meet each half term to discuss how we can make our school greener. Since they have formed, they have been very busy and in October 2025, they planned and led an assembly on reducing plastics in our oceans and seas. They discussed how harmful plastics can be to our environment and discussed ways in which we can reduce single use plastics, reuse plastic items or recycle plastic items. The Eco Council also held a poster competition in school to highlight how harmful single use plastics can be to our environment

We were also fortunate to be visited by Isla from Veolia, who led a whole school assembly all about recycling. She also led two classroom workshops and met with our Eco Council to help them with ideas and ways in which we can promote recycling in our school.

Plastic Free Schools Award

As part of our ongoing work to help reduce plastics in schools, the Eco Council have been hard at work undertaking tasks to gain our Plastic Free schools award. They have already achieved objective 1 and undertook a trash mob of the school grounds to achieve objective 2. As of January 2026. we have three more objectives to achieve before we gain our award. The results of our trash mob indicated that most of the rubbish in and around our school grounds was plastic so we are hoping to implement a plastic free break time once each week, meaning less plastic will be brought into school.

Cut Your Carbon Campaign

As well as recycling and reducing the use of plastics in school, the Eco Council have been exploring other ways in which we can reduce our carbon footprint.

In November 2025, they participated in a carbon cutting campaign, the idea being, that we could focus on six challenges to see if we could ‘Cut our Carbon’ in this month. The challenges were shared on our school newsletter and to classes and each week the Eco Council went around to classes to see who had completed or participated in the challenges. They then tallied the results and we entered our results to get a report back to show our impact. The results are in the report on this website. By making simple, small changes, we are helping our planet.

• Cut Your Carbon Checklist
• Cut Your Carbon Impact Report

Eco Council Gallery