The last week of term has been Sustainability Week at Ardingly, with a range of events and activities to promote sustainable practices among our students and staff and to help educate our community further on issues related to sustainability both at the College and beyond.
It has been fantastic to see so many people getting involved in so many different ways across the week. There have been talks and visits to fire our students’ imaginations, with the sixth lecture in our year-long series on the theme of sustainability from Mr Millward on anthropogenic global warming and a panel of five OAs taking questions from over 50 students about their sustainability-related careers, from financial services to regenerative farming to marketing, whilst Shell and Remove heard from a plethora of speakers organised by Dr Spiers, including representatives of EDF Sizewell C, an OA and former Space X employee, and organisers of the London to Paris Electric Vehicle Rally.
There have been opportunities for our students and staff to put ideas around sustainability into practice, with our maintenance team running our very own Repair Workshop, mending clothes, shoes, pool cues, and even a roulette wheel, and the estates team running educational tours of the College’s biomass boiler. Upper Sixth organised a popular clothes swap event, whilst dozens of students from across the whole College, Prep School and Senior School, have been out at lunchtimes planting another 400 trees as part of our rewilding project.
Some Ardingly favourites have been given a sustainability twist, with the Business Department’s fantastic Take a Risk event challenging Lower Sixth students to come up with sustainable products and the hugely popular House Debating competition culminating in discussions over the role of technology in tackling environmental problems. Meanwhile, boarding Houses have been competing to see who can reduce their energy consumption the most, whilst Art Scholars were challenged to come up with a new design for our electric catering van.
Even in lessons, teachers have been looking for opportunities to discuss issues related to sustainability within their lessons, whilst some of the Shell science classes have been test-driving the Solar Car team’s online course, learning all about the technology that underpins our ‘Basking Beastie’ and other solar cars.
Sustainability Week undoubtedly would not have been such a success without the engagement, enthusiasm and leadership of our students, across all years. Our hope is that it has proved inspiring for our students and can serve as a stimulus to further engagement with issues surrounding sustainability in the future, not only at Ardingly but in their wider lives too.
