The Rivers C.of.E Academy Trust

The Rivers CofE Academy Trust is a trust of sixteen nursery and primary schools located across Worcestershire, Sandwell and Dudley. Sustainability is a core value to the trust, and the curriculum is based around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Within each school is a Forest School, where children are encouraged to play and explore freely while enabling them to learn about the natural environment and embrace independence.

Head of Operations, Fyonna Lamas, has ambitious goals for the school to reach net zero. To do this, she emphasises the importance of data and understanding their baseline.

“If we were going to measure where we were going to, and measure reduction, we needed to have a really good understanding of where we are now, and we needed to get that data.”

The Rivers CofE Academy Trust joined Worcestershire County Council’s decarbonisation portal programme in late 2023. Since then, they have endeavoured to calculate and record a baseline carbon footprint across all of their 13 Worcestershire schools. This exercise has been made simpler through the Climate Essentials platform, where data points are divided into four categories: Energy, Transport, Products & Services and Waste. The dashboard, which shows their final carbon footprint, has data visualisation and contextualisation, making the numbers understandable and easily communicated to the wider community.

“It’s given us the guidance that we needed and the backing to know that what we’re doing is correct, and to know that our data is something meaningful.”

Having completed data collection across its Worcestershire sites, The Rivers CofE Academy Trust has turned its attention to forming a strategic plan to get them to their goal of net zero by 2050. The trust has already identified some focus areas, such as waste collection, paper usage and water consumption. With a focus on measurable actions and armed with robust and clear data, the trust aims to make their sustainability journey meaningful to the entire school community.