Creating an Eco-Friendly Early Years Setting

A Practical Guide

Cheryl Hadland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429819919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers a comprehensive guide to becoming a more eco-friendly setting, from small steps that can be taken to reduce waste and improve efficiency to setting up partnerships. It illustrates how sustainable choices can become a natural part of every child's education and how children, parents and staff can all inspire sustainable behaviour across local communities and at national and international levels.

Covering all aspects of practice including colleague and parental engagement, the environment, routines, resources, and teaching and learning, the book helps readers and practitioners to embed a sustainable approach in day-to-day practice. It draws on recent research, studies and stories of success and failure that can be adapted to fit everyone's own journey towards a more sustainable world. The chapters address topics such as:

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• plastics and their alternatives

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• sustainable food

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• sustainable resourcing

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• transport and trips

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• waste management.

Drawing on the experiences of real nurseries and including a wide range of activities and lists of resources, this is an essential read for practitioners, leaders, policymakers and all settings that want to help make sustainable choices a natural part of young children's lives.

1

Parents

Introduction

Of course, when using the word ‘parents’, I mean adults with parental responsibility for the children in our care; they could be foster or adoptive parents, grandparents or extended family, so please read all of these into any descriptor saying just parents, just for brevity.

Parents are our customers, our key stakeholders. They choose us to look after their children and they pay the bills either personally, via their employer or as taxpayers. Like any business, communication is two-way. We need to listen to what their needs are and we must communicate how we can meet their needs and, in the early years sector, of course the needs of their children.

Sometimes there is an educational aspect to our communications with parents. They come from all backgrounds and levels of experience; from young mums who need childcare while they do their school exams, to experienced, mature mothers of four who may have strong opinions on what they require from us for their children, and everything in between, each one an individual. Some parents might have English as a second language or have sight or hearing limitations; some will be highly educated, some will be competitive, tiger mums; others will be laid back and very relaxed, but all will have subscribed to the ethos that we are offering. But we have to adjust our messages and the way we communicate them, potentially to every individual, to ensure we are understood and working together for the child.

This chapter looks at how we might communicate our vision on sustainability to parents. This poses the same challenges as for general communications. Some parents may be totally unaware and new to the concept; some may be CEOs who have written their own CSR document; another might have a master’s degree in environmental science, or marine biology, or be the sustainability coordinator of a local charity or business. How can we adapt to engage all of these?

Role-modelling within the nursery

Environmental stewardship for their children is a concept that parents can appreciate; it shows we care about the environment that their children will inherit. When you show parents into the nursery, whether new or existing parents, it is an opportunity to speak about why environmental stewardship is important to you, on behalf of the children, and what you are doing – point out the composter, the children’s garden, and the plants inside, all those little things as you go around: it can only be appreciated.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires to existing parents, manually on paper, or preferably online such as Survey Monkey, are a normal element of administration for your service. At the end of 2017, we added the question on whether the nurseries being eco-friendly was important to parents into our annual Survey Monkey questionnaire – 86.48 per cent said yes! And in 2018 it was slightly higher. We will be asking the same or similar questions every year from now on and we will be very interested in the answers. Now if 86 per cent of your parents said they wanted to buy t-shirts for their children, would you try to supply some? We started selling t-shirts successfully at only a 54 per cent ‘yes’ response, so a result this high indicates a strong and existing interest, and we also know some were not interested

If you can include some open questions, you will get indications of what objections and what support you might expect from the parents as well, and you can engage accordingly. For example, you might find one parent fits solar panels and might do you a deal; another loves gardening and might be prepared to come in sometimes to show colleagues and children how to plant some vegetables; another might make soap and be happy to do a demonstration or to provide some. Parents can really help with the sustainability journey.

Key workers

Key workers, by definition, will be learning all about the child’s and parents’ needs on a day-to-day basis. They are the front line; they are the ones who can speak to parents bringing in plastic bags to stop them and suggest alternatives, to encourage them to try out cloth nappies, and to explain why we don’t have balloons. They can also introduce parents to each other for mutual support and advice, for example the experienced mum using cloth nappies might well be happy to share advice and tips with a new mum thinking of trying them.

Listening to parents

Parent power stopped us serving beef a few years ago, in the days of mad cow disease in the UK. New Zealand still doesn’t allow beef imports from the UK due to this disease. There is a balance required here; we must listen to parents, and we also need to be pragmatic in order to protect our business and our own livings.

Sometimes, sustainable actions that we would like to put in place are just not viable because parents do not support the idea, or do not fully understand the benefits. You either have to try again to sell the benefits, perhaps in a different way, or bide your time and try again in a different way. If you force change on parents, they might leave the nursery – and you almost certainly don’t want that to happen. So don’t be afraid to sound parents out, verbally via the manager, or even the owner speaking to them one-to-one or by arranging a parent meeting. You want to hear the objections so that you can offer answers or alternatives.

Noticeboards

Just in case the key workers miss the conversation, or parents are waiting for something in a corridor with a noticeboard up, don’t miss the opportunity to have an attractive and interesting noticeboard, and/or posters around explaining what we are doing with sustainability, using the ‘whys’ that you’ve already shared with staff. Companies such as Lush sell soaps with a price point about four times the price of supermarkets and in chemists. The perception is that an eco-product is worth more than a non-eco-product, so make this point to your parents. Your environment and teaching is worth more if it’s eco; even if you don’t charge more, it’s beyond the average expectation – at least currently it is. In fact, looking forward, those who do not start to act sustainably could find themselves losing children to those who do. As we know from our survey, parents include sustainability as part of their criteria for choosing their children’s provider.

Newsletters

Whether these are emailed, Facebook, printouts once a week, or glossy magazines once a year, these are of course prime opportunities to explain your vision, mission and objectives and to engage parents in your progress. However, if it is at all possible to send these out electronically, this is far more sustainable – by creating an e-version of our welcome pack for parents, with information such as terms and conditions, enrolment forms, policies and more, we saved £750 on printing per 500 visits.

Website and social media posts

If you use these, they will all need updating once you start your sustainability journey. The message needs repeating, and explaining, many times, in many different ways, in order to attract parents on board if they aren’t interested. You may want to post not only in Facebook, but in Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. as you discover which forms of communications your parents like to see.

Sustainability will be a source of interesting news, some lovely pictures of children with their plants, or in the sand, or sharing stories about turtles and whales, and these are likely to engage prospective parents as well as your existing parents.

Online presence is a great way to communicate with parents. Parents need to know what’s in it for them and their children, so blogs that tell them this will help get them on board.

Events

Some parents really appreciate and enjoy being part of nursery outings and meeting other parents – and sustainability activities can be an opportunity for this, such as having pop-up shops selling sustainability items (eg real nappies) set up in the nursery, or inviting parents to join with you and the children on a beach clean. Figure 1.1 is a photograph of a parent and her daughter on such a trip to our local beach in Bournemouth. The story of this beach clean, which we held in collaboration with our local university, was also press-released. Various articles and photographs were published as a result, showing other parents how responsible we are, which led to more footprint on our website and more enquiries on our phones.

Figure 1.1 Parent and child during a Tops Day Nurseries beach clean on Bournemouth beach

Extending into the home

You can now offer a different kind of homework to engage parents with their children between attendances at nursery. We can ask them to bring in boxes, tubes and cartons for us to recycle in our craft activities – and this is part of sustainability. You probably do it already!

You could design helpful resources in line with your actions in the nursery to continue the learning at home, such as ‘switch it off’ or ‘recycling’ posters that the children have drawn and then take home to their parents to continue the message there. The children could then remind their parents, and older siblings perhaps?

Figure 1.2 Sticker to place near light switch, issued to all children/parents at Tops Day Nurseries

We also found that showing off our bamboo ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Parents
• 2 Working with colleagues
• 3 Pedagogy
• 4 Plastics, and their alternatives
• 5 Nappies and wet wipes
• 6 Play activities
• 7 Children’s gardening
• 8 The natural world and pets
• 9 Electronic equipment
• 10 Building design
• 11 Cleaning, sanitising and disinfecting, personal care
• 12 Sustainable food
• 13 Sustainable resourcing
• 14 Transport and trips
• 15 Waste management
• 16 Legal framework and relevant accreditations (not early years specific)
• 17 Advocacy
• 18 Standards, curricula and accreditation specific to early years
• Summary
• Appendix I: Suppliers’ sustainability and eco-grading
• Appendix II: Tops Day Nurseries Corporate Social Environmental Responsibility (CSER) Policy
• Appendix III: Tops Day Nurseries and Aspire Training Team Sustainable Travel Plan and Policy
• Appendix IV: Environmental dates to celebrate
• Appendix V: Useful websites
• Appendix VI: Sustainability checklists
• Appendix VII: Children’s books
• Appendix VIII: Educators’ resources
• Index