Leave No Trace

The end of last week saw Crew Ali out in the sunshine doing Clean Up Crew, a weekly fixture which Crews sign up to do across XP and XP East.  One of our core values is Stewardship and the principle that we ‘leave no trace‘.  It’s really important to us that we all roll our sleeves up and get involved, and it’s amazing how much litter we found blowing in from outside the school grounds.  This is something Eco Crew have identified as one of their areas to work on as we prepare to apply for our Bronze Award and Eco Reps Keisha, Aaron, Sami and Alice are leading on this.

Click here to visit the Eco Crew website and find out more.

Introducing the XP East Eco-Crew

Congratulations to Brendan, Dakota, Corey, Callie, Theone, Aran, Keisha, Aaron, Ruby, Ruben, Dylan, Ava, Alice, Sami, Zach and April for being successfully nominated by their Crews to represent XP East on the Eco-Crew.  They will lead the school in gaining Bronze Award Accreditation through the Eco-Schools programme!

Eco-Schools “empowers pupils, raises environmental awareness, improves the school environment and also creates financial savings for schools. It engages the wider local community and links to the curriculum.  The Eco-Schools Green Flag is an internationally recognised award for excellence in environmental action and learning”; our first step towards gaining a Green Flag for XP East will be to achieve Bronze Award Accreditation.

For more information please visit the Eco-Schools website.

How do we build an Eco School of our own?

E24’s most recent STEAM Learning Target was “I can evaluate to what extent my school meets the criteria to become an Eco School”. The Guiding Question for this joint HUMAN-STEAM expedition is “How can we build a place of our own?”

They researched what it takes to apply for Eco School Bronze Accreditation and presented their findings to E25 students; consequently they drummed up so much interest we now have 47 nominees for 8 positions on the new Eco Committee!

E24 students then carried out their own Environmental Reviews of the school, identifying what we are doing well and what we could improve on across 10 topic areas. Thank you to all the staff who helped in answering questions ranging from “do school meals use fish from sustainable sources?” to “what steps have XP East taken to reduce energy usage?” All of this builds on the work we have been doing since September on energy usage, sustainability and efficient building design.

Finally the students each created their own Action Plan with suggestions which the final Eco Committee may take forward in the real whole-school Action Plan. Here are photographs of a selection, including Nathan’s, which considered increasing student intake of fruit at sporting events; through live class critique of his work on the board Nathan could share his original ideas as well as gain constructive feedback as to how to improve his answers in the ‘monitoring’ column.


Watch this space to learn more about who is selected by their Crews for positions on the Eco Committee as well as the Committee’s final three focus topics for the school Action Plan…

Last Friday saw the inaugural circuit of Lakeside completed by our Mountain Biking Club…our first outing together. It was a mixed bunch of abilities, experiences and skills, with Y9 XP students Bailey, Marley, Brandon and James joining XP East students Isabel, Aaron, Ella and Callie….and Charlie representing the Y7s in XP School.

The new Trek mountain bikes were more than capable of tackling the terrain, and our instructor Chris was both patient and knowledgeable.

We practised basic downhill techniques, controlling our speed and traction and next week we plan on heading out into the woods to hone our new skills.

Mountain Biking Club meets every Friday after school from 3.30 – 5.00.