There is existing engagement with sustainable education within Houston Primary School. There is a gardening club for the children to volunteer at every week. At the club the children are responsible for planting a variety of different vegetables and then when their crops have grown they use them to make food such as soup. This club allows for children to see the importance of growing your own vegetables and allows them to have fun and get practical with sustainable education. There is also a recycling committee within the school, who make sure that all paper is being recycled efficiently. At the end of the week the recycling committee go around the classrooms and collect the paper themselves and put it into the recycling bins. Each class also has a litter picking slot for each week. This allows the children to get involved with the clearing up of their environment and will encourage them to look after their community outside of school. The Eco Committee in the school gets involved with the recycling of clothes and distributing ‘electricity wardens’ to turn off switches, lights and computers at the end of the day. Houston Primary School also holds 4 green flags which shows how eco-friendly the school is.

Play space is relatively quite small compared to the quantity of children in the school. From the digimap above you can see that there is not a great amount of tarmac provided for the children to play on. However, they have access to different areas of the playground, once a week, which include a climbing frame, an outdoor gym and a sandpit (identified on the map above with a blue x). There are also tyres scattered about and painted games on the ground which are available at all times for the children. From the map above, it is clear that there is a large area of grassland – marked with a green x – available for play. However, this is only useable in the summer as it becomes extremely waterlogged in the winter.

I sat down with a small group of children and asked them to consider the different clubs in their school related to sustainable development and what they thought of their playground. All the children were aware of the effect that they can have on the environment. They enjoy being involved in several types of sustainable education which have a positive effect on their environment. Some of the children I spoke with mentioned that they enjoy doing litter picking once a week with their class. Litter picking gives them the opportunity to go outside and get hands on with sustainable education whilst having fun with their friends, tidying the environment that they play in. They enjoy energy saving week and recycling their clothes. The children also commented on the size of their play area and spoke about the different facilities such as the outdoor gym and sand pit which they enjoy playing in with their friends. However, they only get access to these facilities once a week and would enjoy spending more of their play time there.