Green Flag Awarded To Jerudong International School
Post written by Jerudong International School, Brunei
Setting ourselves the goal of being as sustainable as possible in terms of our campus, our community, and our curriculum here at Jerudong International School has been challenging. Our 120-acre school campus is very large and our student population covers a wide age range, from pre-kindy to sixth form. However, the Seven Steps set out by Global Eco-Schools have provided us with a valuable framework to help guide us in our endeavours. Following these steps has called for creative thinking on the part of our Education for Sustainable Development team, and required plenty of goodwill, support, and encouragement from students, staff, and our wider community. We have had highs and lows in our journey, but we are very proud of many of the new initiatives that have resulted and have certainly learned a lot along the way.
Our House Forest Levels Award encourages all of our 16 Houses to have Eco-Reps and Eco-Committees who in turn encourage the students in their respective Houses to get involved in various activities from in-school recycling, to running House Green Businesses and volunteering for events such as beach cleans and tree planting. We work closely with the school maintenance staff and are delighted that our purchasing department now buys toilet paper from the local company that receives our waste paper for recycling.
Students also play an important role in the development of our Outdoor Discovery Centre, a 1-hectare site within our school grounds which acts as an outdoor classroom showcasing student-led projects such as rewilding, fruit and vegetable gardens, rainwater harvesting, and eco-art. Our annual Earth Week events are held here, including workshops run by our student leaders and invited guests from local organisations.
All of these activities tie in with the Eco-Schools Themes and the wider Sustainable Development Goals, which are publicised through a range of different platforms, such as assemblies and social media sites, and are encapsulated in our School’s Sustainability Logo.
Environmental Reviews are carried out each year, to help track our progress, drawing on the help of different groups across the school. For example, the Year 7 Geographers start their year with a unit called ‘Our Sustainable School’ in which they learn about the Green Flag Award and investigate themes such as Energy, Food, and Waste. Whilst the ODC team carries out reviews on Biodiversity, Climate Change, and School Grounds. The review findings and discussion summaries are then passed to our central EfSD team, based in our school’s Sustainable Development Hub, who help to coordinate action plans in selected areas based on this feedback.
Although we are now able to fly the Green flag over our school with pride, we know that our journey is not over. We are keen to develop the key initiatives that we now have in place, and we will do our best to act on the recommendations provided by Global Eco-Schools assessors to help us progress further over the coming months.
