Cassop Primary School case study

Cassop Primary School embodies many of the green ideals now being touted by politicians and campaigners alike but the school is not simply jumping on the sustainability bandwagon.

Its most startling innovation is a wind turbine in the grounds which, through a partnership with Durham County Council and Northern Electric, has cut energy bills by a third.

“Put simply, we save one third of our electricity back by producing excess electricity ourselves,” says the headteacher, Jim McManners. “The power that we produce during the night and holidays, which we can’t use, is exported via the National Grid and we are paid for it.”

The school also uses low-energy light bulbs throughout and elected pupils, known as energy monitors, graph and analyse the school’s energy and water use to identify efficiency savings.

“As a school we had always used the environment a great deal both to stimulate learning, because it interests and enthuses the children, and also to try to make children more aware of their surroundings,” says McManners. “From that it became obvious that if you were serious about making improvements to your environment you needed to act locally but it was also impossible to ignore the big things on the horizon - climate change in particular. We had to find ways to introduce it and still present things in a positive way to children.”

The school is highly successful in academic terms - Ofsted termed it ‘outstanding’ - and McManners believes there is a direct link between its performance and the fact that the children learn by working on projects which are important in the real world, rather than being artificially constructed for the classroom.

“Our children succeed because of the approach we take, which is to give them a lot of first-hand learning experience. We don’t believe in regurgitating stuff second-hand from packs. It’s the difference is between getting a ready-cooked meal and creating something from ingredients.”

Concern about climate change and other environmental issues means that the school is frequently contacted now by schools and other organisations keen to see their work and he encourages other teachers to spend a day at Cassop.

McManners, who originally studied biology and has a farming background himself, believes there are two factors driving the interest.

“At last people have woken up to [environmental issues] being something that people can seriously tackle. And one of the obvious places to address them is education. People are also waking up to the fact that energy costs are high and they are having to look at renewable energy now as serious economic prospect now, rather than something that’s a bit quirky.”