Category: Bundle 1

Spring Clean Scotland 2025

We are thrilled to invite your school to participate in Spring Clean Scotland 2025, taking place from 21 March to 21 April 2025. This annual campaign, organized by Keep Scotland Beautiful, aims to unite over 50,000 volunteers across the country to tackle litter and enhance our beautiful environment.

Spring Clean Scotland 2025

Last year, over 100 litter picks were completed in the Falkirk Council area over the course of the campaign – can we smash that record this year???

Why Get Involved?

  • Educational Opportunities: Engage pupils in hands-on activities that teach the importance of environmental stewardship.
  • Community Impact: Contribute to a nationwide effort to keep Scotland clean and green.
  • Health and Wellbeing: Promote outdoor activity and community engagement among pupils.

Special Initiatives for Schools:

  • KSB Litter League 2025: From 17 March to 21 April, schools, nurseries, and youth groups can participate in a friendly competition to see who can collect the most litter. Winners will be recognized as #SpringCleanScotland champions!

Spring Clean Litter League

  • KSB Spring Clean Week Live Lessons: Scheduled from 17 to 21 March, these lessons focus on unique types of waste and emphasise the principles of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They are designed to align with various curriculum areas and include follow-up resources.

Spring Clean Live Lessons

  • Lessons from Falkirk Council Waste Services: Throughout the campaign and beyond, lessons/assemblies surrounding impacts of litter can be arranged for all age groups by emailing ross.guthrie@falkirk.gov.uk.

How to Get Involved

  • Plan Your Event – Organize a litter pick within your school grounds or local community.
  • Borrow Equipment – Falkirk Council Waste Services can provide litter pickers, hoops, bags, and hi-vis vests. Simply let us know when registering your litter pick and we’ll do our best to accommodate your needs.
  • Register Your Litter Pick with Falkirk Council – When you register your litter pick with Waste Services through the link below, we’ll sign you up as a participant in Spring Clean 2025:

Rubbish and litter: Organising a local clean up – Falkirk Council

By working together, we can inspire the next generation to care for and protect our environment. We hope your school will be part of Spring Clean Scotland 2025 and help make it the most impactful yet!

For any questions, please reply to this e-mail or contact waste.services@falkirk.gov.uk

Let’s work together to keep Scotland beautiful!

LitterLotto League Launched by Falkirk Waste Services!

 

In May this year, Falkirk Council formed an exciting new partnership with LitterLotto (Peasy), giving individuals the opportunity to win cash prizes whilst keeping our community clean.  To complement this, we will be launching a secondary school litter league from November 2024.

The concept of this partnership revolves around incentivising the binning of litter on school grounds, and beyond, to promote a behavioural change and help keep our local communities clean and tidy.  The litter league will enable Falkirk Council secondary schools to compete against each other to bin the most litter in order to win prizes for pupils and the schools themselves!  Pupils can download the LitterLotto app on a smartphone, which will be linked to the school, and using the app’s camera function they can begin to photograph themselves binning litter and raise their school up the league standings.

Every month, the pupil who has binned the most litter in each secondary school will receive a £20 Scotland Loves Local gift card. Additionally, the top performing school at the end of each term will receive £200!

To ensure that the size of the school does not provide major advantages or disadvantages in relation to the term and overall prizes, we will be calculating this based on the number of entries/school roll.

To launch LitterLotto, Ross Guthrie, Falkirk Council Waste Services Education officer hopes to visit schools in November to explain how this initiative works to young people.

If you have any enquiries, please contact wasteservices@falkirk.gov.uk

Secondary Schools Energy Reduction Competition

Sharing the energy reduction challenge

Between October 2024 and March 2025 Falkirk Secondary Schools will compete to see which school can reduce their gas and electricity use the most. This competition will be led by a group of young people in each school who will be supported by a teacher and other staff members.

Prizes:

  • The school which reduces their unit usage most will receive £2000
  • For second place it’s £1000
  • And for third place £500
  • There will be other prizes
  • Prizes will be awarded at a ceremony in May/June 2025

The challenge to reduce carbon emissions and energy units/costs was issued by the Falkirk Council Place Services Extended Management Team. Our Falkirk Council Climate Change team are working with Children’s Services Learning for Sustainability colleagues to support schools with their efforts to reduce energy use.

Scroll down to explore the support which is available to staff and pupils taking part.

The Climate Change team support for young people and their adult:

  • We have created this guidance for the competition lead teacher or person in each school.
  • We will lead an information session for lead staff members on 17th September 4 – 5 pm via Microsoft Teams. (Lead staff members should sign up via CPD Manager code LfS 6-25).
  • Each school can have one remote or in-person lesson for their class or group of young people (just email climatechange@falkirk.gov.uk with 3 potential dates and times). 
  • We will provide access to a platform where you can access past, present and real time information about each schools’ energy use.
  • This webpage will include the leader board information and monthly energy use reports for each school. 
  • We are happy to offer advice and support at any point via email climatechange@falkirk.gov.uk .

SSI Learning for Sustainability & Digital Learning Team Support – what’s available?

This project fits beautifully with our Falkirk Learning for Sustainability Framework bundle 1 – exploring sustainable practices. Yvonne McBlain can support pupil voice or eco groups and staff members who lead this challenge. She can help them to plan & document this learning if needed and has created this interdisciplinary starter plan which captures the learning and skill development young people could gain from their participation.

Our digital learning team have created this document. to help with digital campaigning also.

Creative Tools Which Teach Pupils about Biosecurity

Pupil power takes saving our seabirds to another level

Online education resources designed by school children launched by conservation project

RSPB Scotland is encouraging primary schoolteachers to inspire Scotland’s young nature conservationists to save our seabirds by signing up to a free education resource.

Designed by pupils for pupils, with the support of RSPB Scotland’s Education, Youth & Families team, the resources are all available in English, Gaelic and Welsh. They have been produced as part of the Biosecurity for LIFE project which is working to raise awareness of the threat of invasive predators to seabirds and put in place systems to prevent their accidental introduction to islands. Click here to watch a short video which explains this biosecurity threat.

The education resource pack is available here, and includes online modules including:

  • an online snakes and ladders style game created by pupils from Small Isles and Raasay Primary – the aim of of the game is to collect as many eggs as possibly whilst avoiding predators,
  • a module showing how pupils launch a campaign to share this important conservation story
  • a free physical board game designed by pupils from Small Isles Primary with the aim of eradicating rats from islands.

For more information on the six modules, visit http://www.biosecurityforlife.org.uk/educaton. Click here to read the full press release about how the resources were developed. The programme is easy to navigate and celebrates the creative ideas of children as a way to teach school pupils about biosecurity.. If you would like to sign up to this FREE programme, please fill in and return the request from attached to educationscotland@rspb.org.uk and we will get it sent out in the post. Please note, the board game is part of module 3 of the programme and there is a digital snakes and ladders game included as well.