Through its membership and functions, the Eco Committee serves the following purposes:
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to ensure that all sectors of the school community (especially pupils) are represented in the decision-making process |
Surveys, suggestion boxes, assemblies, reports to Pupil Councils, PTAs, SMT etc can support this requirement. Again, this takes the pressure off the Eco Committee and ensures that virtually whole-school involvement can be justified.
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to ensure that the whole school is aware of progress on the Eco-Schools programme |
Eco Committees may decide to set up a Public Relations (PR) sub-group to ensure that their aims, actions and successes are well known by pupils, parents and the local community. This may involve making posters, maintaining the Eco-Schools notice board, writing articles for local newspapers and school newsletters etc. The Eco Committee should take every opportunity to deliver their message via school assemblies, school radio, websites and all other means of communication.
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to ensure the programme has support from senior management |
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to link the programme to the management of the school and to the wider community. |
Committees can take many forms depending on individual schools. For example,
they can be:
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a working group or sub-committee of an existing Pupil Council, augmented by extra members from other parts of the school community |
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a group that meets half-termly, delegating most functions to working groups or sub-committees that meet more frequently |
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in small schools, the committee might include all pupils. |
Whatever form your own committee takes, it must fulfil the purposes outlined above, and it must include pupils among its members. As far as possible, pupils should fill all executive roles of the committee.
Committees should keep records of their decisions as minutes. The minutes should be reported to school management meetings, to parent forums, to class or year groups and should be displayed on the Eco-Schools noticeboard. Key issues could be raised in assemblies.
The templates folder on the Eco-Schools Guide CD contains examples of documents that you may find useful when setting up and running your committee. These include templates for producing committee membership certificates, minute taking and gathering useful local contacts. You can also download these from the Eco-Schools Scotland website.
Secondary schools need to be very organised about ensuring continuity – particularly if the Eco Committee is largely made up of senior pupils. The loss of pupils from S4 and above during the ‘study leave’ period in third term can cause a damaging vacuum and the loss of S6 pupils at the end of their school education can be particularly devastating. Some form of pre-arranged ‘hand-over’ of responsibilities is important.
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