IOE demonstrates green impact in the UCL Sustainability Awards 2022

Five teams from across IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, were awarded for their sustainability initiatives in the awards ceremony held on Wednesday 6 July 2022, showing how staff are making a positive environmental impact in the faculty.

Green Impact Awards: Bronze

The Primary PGCE programme team won a Green Impact Bronze Award. Dr Janet Davies, Lecturer in Primary Education at IOE, who led the team’s green initiatives, said: 

“This year we added a new aim to our vision of what is like to be a UCL Primary PGCE student. This is that our students would be 'Empowered to champion sustainability' throughout their course. As a team of Primary PGCE lecturers we wanted to show that we were 'walking the sustainability walk' alongside the students. 

Having achieved the award, next year our aim is to bring student action and lecturer action even closer together in the initiatives we plan. We are working on how the PGCE Primary Curriculum for students can offer an ongoing thread of climate change education and sustainability to our students. We want to empower them to take the practice into their placement schools and beyond into their careers.” 

Green Impact is a UCL-wide behaviour change scheme that enables staff to lead initiatives that make their work environments greener and engage colleagues with sustainability issues. The initiatives feed into the aims of UCL's Sustainability Strategy. Since the launch of UCL’s first Environmental Sustainability Strategy in 2013, UCL has become a leader on sustainability in the Higher Education sector. UCL has made 28% of carbon savings over the last decade and are now sourcing all of its electricity from renewable sources, including from 2,400 solar panels situated across UCL’s own campus. 

The Climate Action Team at the Centre for Languages and International Education (CLIE) also won a Green Impact Bronze Award for their range of initiatives. Dr James Cross, Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in CLIE, led the team’s project to convert the Centre's drinking water fountain to one fed from the mains supply, removing the associated plastic waste and eliminating the carbon footprint caused by bottles being delivered by road.  

CLIE’s Climate Action Team also organised and ran a cycle-training event in conjunction with Camden Council to encourage international students who are new to London to try out cycling, with plans to run the event again for new students in the next academic year. Other actions included a campaign to cut down on printing and to make more use of digital teaching materials, plus the introduction an annual photocopying limit. 

Sustainability Impact and Green Impact Awards: Silver

The Academic Programmes Office (APO) Student Support Team at IOE were awarded a "Highly Commended" status for the Sustainability Impact Award, while the APO Green Crusaders were awarded the Green Impact Silver Award. 

The Student Support Team ran several projects for staff and students during the academic year to encourage making small sustainable changes and to make a positive impact on students' experience during their studies at IOE. Their 'Grow together' campaign created a student 'plant buddies' community which connected around 500 students, staff and plants. The team facilitated check-ins and meetings for participants to talk about plants, gardening, mental health and wellbeing. 

Green Impact Awards: Gold

Colleagues in the IOE Library took home a Green Impact Gold Award, for their initiatives to establish a local wellbeing tree walk, their re-design of the IOE Library recycling facilities and signs to encourage correct recycling, and making several library processes paperless. 

Robert Seymour, who led the initiatives, said: “The tree walk was chosen to encourage people to get outside at lunchtime and to enjoy the wondrous trees all around us. Recycling correctly is a real problem and I really want to do everything I can to make it simple for our users. Going paperless in every area we can seemed like an easy change with a big impact. I’m very happy with what has been achieved and I’m looking to expand our green impact team to achieve even greater things in the future.” 

To honour all of the winners, Sustainable UCL donated 315 trees to the UCL Grove, sequestering 18,900kg of carbon *(one tree can consume approximately 60kg of CO2 from the atmosphere). Sustainable UCL also handed out award certificates printed on seeded paper, inviting all recipients to grow wildflowers from their certificates. 

Links

• All UCL Sustainability Award 2022 results 
• Sustainable UCL 
• Change Possible: The Strategy for a Sustainable UCL 2019 - 2024 
• PGCE Primary
• IOE Library
• Centre for Languages and International Education (CLIE) 

Image

Staff from various UCL teams at the 2022 UCL Sustainability Awards ceremony. Photo by James Tye for UCL.