What are the benefits?
Up to 20% of your energy and water consumption can be a result of poor awareness and management. Maximum savings are only possible if everyone is aware and involved in trying to reduce usage.
Raising awareness is the first step to behavioural change, so inform everyone of your energy and water management activities and encourage them to take part. This will in turn raise your profile both internally and externally, helping to:
- Encourage pupil / parent selection
- Recruit staff and governors
- Improve the success of any future activities
- Motivate others to take action by taking the initiative.
How to get started
Speak to teachers, staff and pupils about how energy and water is used in school to get an idea of the current level of awareness.
Internal actions:
- Set up notice boards in prominent locations
- Create posters as part of an Art or English lesson which can be displayed around the school
- Register with the Sustainable Learning programme and promote this in school
- Run assemblies to feed back initial findings and promote successes.
External actions:
- Incorporate information into newsletters and your school website
- Write newspaper articles
- Prominently display activities during open days or parent /teacher evenings.
Resources to help you raise awareness
The programme also provides colourful posters and stickers to help you with your awareness campaign. You can download and print these to display around your school.
Working through the website activities and ticking them on online will release colourful certificates which you can use to demonstrate your progress.
If you would like to appear on our site as a short ‘case study’, please click on the 'Tell us about your progress' link at the bottom of your homepage and send us some information, briefly summarising what you have been up to, together with an image you would like us to use.
You don’t need to have reached any particular level, but if you have found an innovative way to progress through the programme and would like to tell others, we would love to hear from you.
Where to get further information
The Carbon Trust provides a free guide ‘Creating an awareness campaign’ (CTG001) which includes some great ideas on how to raise awareness and increase involvement in your energy and water saving activities.
