Healthy Community

St Thomas of Canterbury has a long-standing commitment to the health of its children, staff, associates and the wider community. We believe it is paramount for the children to understand how a person's individual actions can affect the the wider world and so the children work together to make changes to better help themselves, their families, their friends and their environment.

The various leadership teams we have within school, along with the staff, help to shape changes to our everyday lives that can have a wider impact on the community and its future.

Reducing Waste

At St Thomas of Canterbury we are committed to reducing our carbon footprint and the children understand that recycling can be a small effort with a big reward. The Eco-Council have drawn up various ways we can lower our own footprint and this starts with simple recycling.

The school has long recycled paper (and will continue to do so) but we are always looking for more ways we can separate our waste and so we also recycle ink-cartridges, batteries and crisp packets. Although as a healthy school we do not encourage eating crisps, there is an inevitability of it so we ask all children to bring in crisp packets to be sent for recycling. The children embrace this fully and will keep packets during trips, sporting events, etc. to bring back to school to make sure they have disposed of them properly. We are currently part of the Terracycle recycling scheme, which the school gains points for according to the weight of packets received, which can then be turned into a monetary charitable donation.

 Reducing Our Carbon Footprint

Headed by our school awards (Eco School & Green Tree), St Thomas of Canterbury is always looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint and the children are involved in coming up with ways that we can do this with little or no inconvenience, which teaches the children that small steps can lead to larger changes. After discussions with the children, the school is committed to making these changes - a few examples of their requests include:

• Walk To School scheme continued
• Keeping lights off where possible
• Computers & IWBs to be switched off where possible
• Doors and windows used effectively to keep heating systems off

Trees & Wildlife

The children at St Thomas of Canterbury learn the importance of trees and their contribution to the world's health.