Dear Parents, Guardians and Friends
We are eagerly following the daily reports of the COP26 summit here at The Holt, and hot on the heels of last Friday’s Education Day, the geography department plan to roll out the resources, videos and discussion points with their classes over the coming weeks.
The issue of climate change and what we can all do to reduce our carbon footprint, to contain global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius is not of course just limited to the geography department, and at The Holt, we are keen to embrace the principles of climate change as a school.
The Big Ask survey that Mrs Kennedy talked about in last week’s blog referred to society’s young people as the “sleeves up” generation. This is most certainly true here with Holly Mackinnon in Year 10 and Ruby Sudlow in Year 12 rolling up their sleeves to get our school community together to agree our very own “locally determined contributions”.
Holly is one of the youth representatives for The Holt at Wokingham Borough Council, she is the student equivalent of a local councillor and, Holly along with Ruby have created The Holt school’s “Climate challenge task force”.
The first meeting was last Friday. Each form in every year group had elected one representative to attend the meeting on their behalf and to feedback. In this first meeting Ruby and Holly explained how each representative would gather ideas from their form as to positive, measurable actions we could adopt as a school to help combat negative climate change. Year 7 and 8 are to concentrate on things we can do around school, Years 9 and 10 are to concentrate on things that we can do in our community and Years 11 and 6th form are to concentrate on things that we can do nationally and beyond.
Each representative will then pitch their idea to Ruby and Holly and the group will vote on the ones that as a school we can adopt as our locally determined contributions. The winning ideas will then be adopted by each year group as their climate challenge task to take forward. We will keep you updated on our goals and progress we make.
In the meantime, please do check this link below out where you can see Holly, along with Shreya, a student in Year 11 being interviewed about their thoughts on climate change. Scroll along to about 12 minutes into the clip.
Elsewhere in school, the beautiful annual display of ceramic poppies has gone up as we commemorate Remembrance Day tomorrow, the 11th of November. Our poppies were created by the technology department some time ago now, and each one adorns the name of a Wokingham life lost in the First World War. We look forward to welcoming a representative from the British Legion along with Reverend Cara Smart from St Pauls’ to lead our service along with our Year 7 students, ex-service staff, and students in uniformed organisations, as we remember the lives lost in service of the country. For the rest of the school, we will hold two minutes’ silence in lesson time.
Finally, a reminder that tomorrow night is our postponed 6th form open evening and we look forward to seeing our Year 11 students and parents and guardians in the hall from 5.45pm to hear all about our 6th form and what we have to offer.
Katie Pearce
Co- headteacher