Academies trust in Boston launches its 'Green Promise' for the year ahead

Boston Park Academy pupils get to grips with nature. Image: Allan McKenzie.

The Voyage Education Partnership has produced the document to drive its environmental sustainability strategy for 2022/23.

This will see the seven schools - Staniland Academy, Haven High, Boston Pioneers, Carlton Road, Fishtoft Academy, Park Academy and Gosberton Academy - all becoming greener.

CEO of Voyage, Emma Hadley, said: "Voyage's Green Promise confirms our commitment to nurture learning in a sustainable environment, so that our whole community can thrive and succeed.

"We asked all of our academies, sites, offices, teams and employees to help us find bespoke ways to contribute to helping achieve our overarching promises in 2022/23.

"Achieving such ambitious targets in the first year of the Promise will set us on the path to achieving our ambitious longer-term aim of full carbon neutrality by 2030."

The promises are:

• To reduce Voyage's carbon footprint across the Trust by 10% by monitoring and reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, and by using greener energy and building efficiency.

• To know more and grow more. The Trust states it is committed to bringing an awareness of sustainability to the forefront of education, both in the taught curriculum and via extracurricular activities and the learning ethos. Voyage will also create significantly more ‘green growing spaces’ on its academy sites.

• To reduce use of paper by 20% by thinking and acting differently.

Voyage's Green Promise states: "We have a moral and ethical duty to consider how we can reduce our impact and operate in a more sustainable way. Crucially, we are educators and leaders who want to lead by example, and lead responsibly.

"We know that environmental sustainability matters greatly to our learners, and we have a duty to listen to their concerns - and to act upon them."

Voyage said its Green Promise was created following consultations with staff and groups of pupils across the Trust's academies, and that the targets contained in it “represent the areas and priorities that everyone deemed the most important”.