Year 10 and 1 join forces for climate change

A breezy and sunny autumn day last Friday, Year 10 Climate Change elective and all of Year 1 looked after our young, establishing hedge along the edge of the school field. We started off bright and early meeting Year 1 on the field. Rob and Laura from Surrey Wildlife Trust taught us about the importance of protecting our hedge and giving the young saplings space to grow. Going off in small groups, we began pulling away the grass to protect the establishing plants. The Year 1s were very excited for this and the time passed so quickly before they then had to leave.

Year 10 continued throughout the morning extending the hedgerow. We lengthened the hedge from 90m to 150m while also filling in lots of the gaps from the previous planting, to replace plants which hadn’t survived. The new saplings planted include six native species, which will add diversity and year-round colour to our hedge. The species being: Dogwood, Hawthorn, Silver birch, Wild cherry, Hazel and Rowan. We found many creatures thriving among our hedge, from snail eggs to angle shade moth caterpillars, larvae and beetles. There is already a greater biodiversity around our growing hedge compared to the rest of the field, which shows why these spaces are so important!

“We are extremely grateful to Laura and Rob, as well as Mrs Howgego who made the day possible. This has been an extremely memorable experience and we really enjoyed our day! We wanted to share some of our favourite moments… We started the day by Rika bringing the sunshine and singing Moana songs while going to get Trevor the Trolley, this was a great kickstart to the day especially because of the COLD. We had multiple jumpscares whilst planting trees when we found worms, snails and snail eggs. Shout out to Lexie who removed them for us. As well as that, we had several slips and falls which all ended up in HEAPS OF LAUGHTER. Overall, it was an extremely fun experience and we’re very excited to watch the trees grow as we get older, especially Rosie, our first tree that was planted.”
Year 10 Pupils

Mrs Harriet Howgego
Head of Chemistry