Welcome to this video on how to complete an Environmental Review.
Once you have formed an Eco-Committee, you need to conduct an Environmental Review. But what does an Environmental Review involve and how can you conduct one?
Always remember when working on any part of Eco-Schools to not only think about what you are doing, but why you are doing it, what is the purpose?
The main purpose of an Environmental Review is to find out how you are doing as a school or nursery at the moment. That will help you to decide what you need to do to become more environmentally friendly.
There are quite a lot of skills involved in conducting a good Environmental Review. These include: imagining how things could be, thinking about what is happening now, finding out about what is happening now, which will include observing and inspecting, you will need to compare where you are now with where you have been and where you want to get to. This will help you review your progress up to now.
As part of all these skills you will need to gather information from various sources, and ask lots of questions. This may seem like a lot but you will find that is easy to do once you get get started.
A good starting point is to use the skill of imagining. Ask the question, "How could our school or even community be the most eco-friendly it could be?" and see what you can imagine.
Now you have imagined your amazing eco-friendly school, it's time to think about what you need to do to create it.
Start by thinking about what things you are already doing that help the environment. Then think about what you need to do differently and think about what you need to change or improve.
Our Environmental Review templates can help you with imagining your school and with asking these questions. You can find the templates on our website.
Now you have big picture ideas for your school. The next step is to look at how your school is doing in more detail. You can do this using our template to review each of our 11 topics.
For example, this is the template for our mandatory topic Climate Action. You can also use our pictorial version of the Environmental Review if it is helpful for you.
After you complete your review, you need to gather your ideas together. Think about these questions. "What do you want to change or improve in your school?" "What are your priorities?"
You might have lots of things you want to change or improve. So it's important to identify the things you want to change the most. For your top priorities, think about what are your aims or where do you want to get to.
And the next step is making the changes happen. To do this you will need an Action Plan.
Thank you for listening we wish you well on your Eco-Schools journey.
