Sustainability is still widely talked about, with many schools making efforts on a daily basis to teach students how to live more sustainable lives. In our exclusive interview with Anthony Cashin, Principal of Kent College Dubai, we look at KCD’s efforts in sustainability, with their solar rooftops and car parks, and their long-term goals when it comes to saving the environment.

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At Kent College Dubai, we see our students for the individuals that they are, and it matters to us who they turn out to be once they graduate from our school. “We see ourselves as providing a whole-child education, not just an academic curriculum. As such, we provide our students with a wide array of outside-of-the-curriculum activities or clubs that will equip them with the skills that we know will set them up for success when they go out into the world,” said Mr. Tim Hollis, Head of the Senior School at Kent College Dubai.

We do this because, by the time pupils graduate from Kent College Dubai, we want them to be internationally-minded people that see themselves as global citizens with a shared custodianship of our planet. We want them to be confident in their opinions, to have the courage to stand by their convictions, to hold previous generations accountable for their actions, and to be confident to be catalysts for positive change in the future.

KCD students know that they hold the future in their hands, and they do not shy away from the weight of this responsibility, because they know that they are equipped with all that’s required for life in an ever-changing world; they are agile, curious, principled, balanced, empathetic, tenacious and brave.

Sustainability/eco-conscious living is one of many of our KCD priorities that we believe will help develop pupils in this way. Mrs. Carmella Jodrell, Head of KCD’s Junior School added “As a school, we are a long way off in terms of our sustainability goals, but we believe that the path to more sustainable living is an ongoing, continually evolving and continually improving process. Every small step is a step in the right direction, and it’s important to not wait for perfection, but rather to just start walking the journey, and improving it along the way as we learn more and more.”

What inspired the ECO-club at Kent College?

Our ECOllege started out at Kent College Dubai as an extracurricular activity, the brainchild of our Senior School Geography Teacher, Mr. Matthew Barker. Mr. Barker is a sustainability and environmental enthusiast who volunteers his time to mentor the ECOllege students and steer them in the right direction. Said Mr. Barker, “together, we have come up with a 5 Point Action Plan, and meet regularly – albeit these days in a socially distanced online capacity – to share findings, propose projects and report on project progress. Initially a Senior School project, we have decided to move away from the idea that this is an ‘initiative’ because environmentally-conscious living is everybody’s responsibility. We have therefore decided to expand the ECOllege brand into a whole-school approach.”

While this new development is still in its infancy, it is very much our intention to pull this to the top of our priority list and get the whole school – staff and pupils – onboard. Tim Hollis added, “we are putting processes in place so that the ECOllege will have a regular presentation slot on our Senior Leadership Team Meetings in order to drive progress forward. We want students to know that sustainability is our priority, and the process of them presenting and escalating ideas to senior leadership in a boardroom environment will also equip them with valuable business skills into the future – everybody wins!”

How does Kent College educate students on sustainability through renewable sources?

Education: Children need to be educated on the facts, in a way that is age-appropriate and understandable for them. In some instances, especially in the case of the ECOllege, these children are switched on when it comes to sustainability – they often do their own research and educate themselves. Furthermore, they share their findings by way of hosting a regular spot in the Junior School and Senior School Assemblies. As teachers, we educate in an age-appropriate manner. So, for example in the early years, something as simple as growing beans provides a platform to discuss growing food, caring for plants and caring for the environment. Whereas in the Senior School, the ECOllege students are encouraged to take a more hands-on approach, such as their plan to draft letters to local businesses to put pressure on them to scrutinise their unsustainable habits such as single-use plastic consumption. Internally, our ECOllege is putting the spotlight on our single-use plastic consumption amongst school staff. In this way, they are holding previous generations accountable for their bad habits, and we applaud this as a school.

Mentorship: As educators, it is important that we strike the right balance between educating pupils and each other on sustainability and eco-conscious living, and enabling students to show initiative and come up with their own solutions. When they are mentored to find their own solution, the ‘wins’ are all the more rewarding. Said Mr. Barker, “Sometimes sustainability goals can seem lofty and unattainable, but when pupils are encouraged and mentored to take their projects from ideation to execution, they begin to realise that their actions have a direct impact on the planet. This teaches them the adage that “change starts with me.” It’s an empowering realisation for them and an important life lesson.”

How does Kent College encourage admin & staff to be environmentally conscious in daily life?

Leading By Example: As stated earlier, we’re a long way off from where we want to be, but the intention to improve is there. One project of which we are immensely proud is our Solar Rooftop and Solar Car park that has been installed by SirajPower. We have installed solar panels on our school’s roof, and car parks are shaded with sunshades that also hold solar panels. Once this project is complete, we anticipate that 50% of our school’s electricity will be drawn from the sun!

As school staff, we have some staff-led initiatives already in place and intend to take more of these types of suggestions into consideration. One such staff-led initiative is what we call Top Up Tuesdays/Thursdays in partnership with Cafu. They have given us a dedicated time slot and QR code so that staff can book and pay for their refuelling individually, but the refuelling happens en masse, on-site, at the same time – we have a carpark on an adjacent lot set away from the school buildings giving easy and safe access to CAFU. Each car that partakes is a saved trip for CAFU and the same amount of saved trips of staff that would have otherwise detoured to a filling station to refuel their cars. All-round it saves emissions for us and for CAFU.

Innovation and Finding Efficiencies

Our Solar rooftop and Solar car parks will go a long way towards saving electricity. Furthermore, our school’s soccer, rugby, cricket and hockey fields are astroturf which is a massive saving on water. We are currently embarking on a Junior School-wide planting project which has seen pupils nurturing a sunflower seed, and these will be planted around the school – the first of many planned “plant more plants and trees” initiatives. Our ECOllege and our Eco Prefect run a PET-plastic bottle recycling project whereby plastic bottles are collected by students and passed on to our recycling partner DGRade – a local company that recycles bottles into yarn for textile production. As much as recycling is the right thing to do, one step further is not using single-use bottles at all. Admittedly, Covid restrictions and safety measures have necessitated a revival of single-use plastic use, but our ECOllege pupils are working hard to find solutions to this problem. Lastly, we have power-saving sensors in the ceilings of all passages, offices and classrooms: lights turn themselves off, and then once sense movement, they turn themselves back on again – it’s a wonderful way to save power, especially for a school where lights are often left on as nobody knows whether they’re the last ones to leave the building.

What are your long-term sustainability goals for the school?

As a school, we are grateful for the seeds that the ECOllege have planted. They started out as an ECA, but their efforts have shone a spotlight on some very pressing global issues and have certainly contributed to our school’s attitude towards sustainability. We currently find ourselves in the awareness phase of our sustainability journey, but our next step is to operationalise the Action Plan as set out by the ECOllege. The Action Plan sets out 5 broad-based goals:

1. Reduce resource consumption
2. Become a ‘single-use plastic’ free school
3. Improve the number of resources we reuse and recycle
4. Offset the carbon we produce
5. Influence businesses to reduce their carbon emissions

When asked what advice she’d give to other schools wanting to start their journey towards a more sustainable existence, Carmella Jodrell said, “Just Start! Start anywhere and start small: as much as we all want to be seen to be making massive strides with grand gestures, in this economic climate that is not always feasible… but that’s not a reason not to start. Even small wins are wins for the environment, and starting the journey gives staff and pupils something to be proud about, and gives them a beacon of hope during these difficult times.”