To empower children to understand their power in the world. To create an authentic, responsible and empathetic school culture. To combat entitlement, greed and hatred by imparting generosity, kindness and peace. To be conciliators between today’s planet and the future world!

At Greenfield we have adopted this mission as our school wide philosophy that stretches across our curriculum, impacting local outreach and creating global intercession. The influence has been monumental and our children are holding their families and communities accountable, influencing genuine change.

Embracing a child-like understanding of the importance of these issues and encouraging the common-sense behaviours that fix them, we have embraced the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a lens through which we teach.

We have used a cross-curricular approach to embed the UN Sustainability Goals into our curriculum. Our current Year 5 Maths project includes working out the average food miles of their weekly meals. In English the children have been learning formal letter writing skills by writing to local MP’s about a UN Sustainable Development Goal of their choice. We have timetabled a weekly lesson for children from years 3 upwards called Understanding the World. In these lessons the children explore culture, historical context and current affairs whilst learning debating skills, the articulation of opinion and the formation of their own views and passions.

School wide initiatives include a UN Enrichment day which enabled different key stages to think, explore and debate in detail a selection of goals before presenting them in our own UN Assembly.

We hosted a Children’s Festival inviting 8 local schools to a day of education based around the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Each school presented on their chosen goal, enjoyed a sustainably-sourced lunch and engaged in a children’s parliament based around UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The school worked together to write a Compassion Charter – a written manifesto of local and global promises in which our children articulated their commitment to kindness, equality and future proofing our planet.

Greenfield have made a pledge to become a no-single use plastic school and have successfully made enormous changes to achieve this goal. We only cater with responsibly sourced fish and offer a greater variety of vegetarian and vegan food.

The Future World is the most popular of our daytime clubs at school. The children meet to assist the wider school community in understanding or taking action to promote the future world. Events include running a Re-Charge station which collects and recycles disposable coffee cups and Nespresso coffee capsules, sells Bamboo re-usable coffee cups and offers re-fills for a small selection of household items.

The school staff bought and delivered warm socks and hot chocolate to the homeless in London on Christmas Eve, whilst parents and pupils collected selections of toiletries for those living on the streets.

As we educate the leaders, business people and citizens of the future, the importance of sustainability in education is essential in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At Greenfield we are empowering the children to play their part in achieving a sustainable future.