A VARIETY of activities around the theme of sustainability took place at Marling School, recently.

Year seven students took part in activities including: wildlife friendly gardening, low tech cooking, low tech sustainable technology, exploring environmental webs and habitat mapping.

The day offered a fantastic opportunity for students to learn more about their impact on the surrounding environment.

It was organised by Frank Gann who is head of the marling environmental forum (MEF) and teaches French and German at the school.

Many volunteers and teachers were involved in the event.

Mr Gann said: ‘all this is moving towards helping the school become a better site with more biodiversity and so on.

The idea actually came from one of our students a few years ago.

The reasoning was really that we wanted people to be thinking about sustainability – not just in the classroom but in a more practical sense.’

In charge of planning the day was Anna Bonallack, of local Community Interest Company Creative Sustainability.

She told reporters: ‘I have organised this event with Marling school today to help the school staff and all the students learn more about how to look after the natural environment and about what sustainability means. I’m really excited when I look around I can see so many things going on.’

Max Freedman, a university student helping with the low-tech sustainable technology activity said ‘At the moment we are making rainwater harvesting systems, fridges and we are heating water using junk, basically.

It has been really enjoyable seeing everyone’s different designs on everything going on.

Everyone is using generally the same principles but there’s lots of different ideas about how to do it, which is really exciting to see.

All the groups I’ve seen have been really enthusiastic, really pragmatic about the entire thing, they’re being very thoughtful about what they’re doing, using lots of scientific ideas and definitely coming away from the projects feeling that they’ve achieved something’

Dr Morgan Philips, of the international award programme Eco-Schools, said: ‘The work Creative Sustainability do with schools to help them embed sustainability into school life and pupil learning is fantastic to see, it is great to hear that they had a really successful day at Marling, one of our Silver Award Eco-Schools, hopefully it will help and inspire them to kick on and achieve the Green Flag award next year’.

This press release was written by Connor Huntly and Oliver Tomkins, Year 7 students at Marling, both aged 12. With Sebastian Newton, Rhys Herschell-Burns, Conor Taylor, Finn Rhys-Davies, and Alex Nunn, these year seven students took part in a community reporters workshop with James Beecher of Transition Stroud (3), producing an eight-minute audio report for new online Cotswolds radio station Bus Stop Radio (4).