Lutley Primary School hosted a ‘Water Warriors Day’ during June. Each class began the day by watching a thought-provoking film, available on the WaterAid website under school resources, before discussing issues raised. Through a variety of different activities, each year group explored the topic of water further: some made Water Warrior masks and shields which included messages to share with their families; some took part in a fun pupil pipeline, older children gathered lots of data about water usage and worked in teams to present it to their schoolmates. The entire school wore blue for the day and managed to raise £255 for WaterAid. Now everyone at Lutley has a much greater awareness about the problems faced by families in parts of the world where unfortunately precious, clean water isn’t always readily available.

At Penshurst pupils are keen to save water, so decided to work on the Eco-School topic Water in their Action Plan. The Eco-Committee placed bottles on display as a visual demonstration of how much water a family in Africa has each day, then throughout the day, all pupils tried to use less water by not flushing as regularly and using hand gel to wash our hands instead of water. The children found the day really interesting and thought-provoking.

When undertaking the Eco-Schools’ Environmental Review the Eco-Committee at West Moors Middle School noticed that they had scored particularly low on the Water topic – so decided that it was a good idea to include this topic in their Action Plan. The Eco-Committee first worked with school staff to ensure that West Moors’ pupils understood the importance of water locally and globally. In a series of Eco-Lessons across Key Stage 2 and 3, pupils were asked to consider how they could take action in school to cut down on water waste, their next challenge was to consider how these actions could also be applied at home. Next pupils learnt about the importance of using the Oceans’ resources responsibly, with a particular focus on marine litter, its origins, and the negative effects it has on marine eco-systems. Finally, pupils explored how Water Aid supports the Basbedo Village in Africa, and how climate change is impacting water sources in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Burkina Faso. All of this learning really helped to open pupils’ eyes to global water issues. On top of this, the actions that pupils had decided on to cut down on water waste in school were implemented resulting in the school shaving almost £1500 off their water bill. One of these actions was for the Eco-Committee to stop using the hosepipe to water their polytunnel and other plants, and instead install and use a large water butt on their school grounds.