FOE's national campaign to raise awareness of the issues surrounding climate change and global warming, and the corresponding initiative by South Gloucestershire Council, have found a really responsive echo in local schools in 2007. We have received many requests to run sessions on the topic, including a number from Somerset, which we have passed on to the relevant local groups down there.

In South Gloucestershire itself we have run sessions for and/or together with two primary and two secondary schools. Regular readers of this Newsletter will remember that I have been working in Winterbourne with Elm Park Primary School's Eco-Committee since 2005, and I did a special lunchtime session with them in mid-March, as a result of which pupils from the school will be displaying related artwork at our Climate Change Roadshow in Downend on June 23.

On the following Monday, March 26, Margaret Pinder and I helped to launch Rangeworthy C of E Primary's Green Week. It's a small rural school with a total of about 44 pupils, and we kept them interested with quizzes, the Mad About Climate Change leaflet, a Wordsearch, and various experiments with kettles, and solar-powered windmills and calculators. The pupils' enthusiasm may have had something to do with the fact that Margaret had devised a game based on energy-saving measures at home, for which South Glos Council had promised solar radios as prizes! The bad news is that these prizes have still not arrived! But the good news is that the school has followed up the Green Week with work on Rainforests, and pupils have built a life-size 'Scrapman' from recycled material, who will appear at the Roadshow.

On the Wednesday of the same week, Denise Thompson, Stella Beecher and I manned our FOE Climate Change stall at the Environment Fair organised by Mangotsfield School. We were one of about ten participants, the others including Fairtrade, SITA and the Forest of Avon, and we saw a well-regulated flow of students with prepared questions throughout a hectic day, with parents and staff involved in the more sedate afternoon session. It was a very successful event, and our materials, particularly the Big Ask badges and the Mad About leaflets, were rapidly exhausted.

Finally, on Tuesday 15 May, Denise, Stuart Shales and I did an afternoon's presentation for about 30 Year 9 pupils at King Edmund Community School in Yate (see picture). We used a variety of materials, including edited extracts from the Al Gore video. Some pupils found it difficult to engage with the topic. This is frequently the case with children in this age group and provides an interesting challenge for us because these are precisely the ones we really need to reach. However, there was an encouraging response at the end of the session when pupils were asked to present their own solutions in poster form.

Working with schools, particularly at primary level, can be very stimulating, and restore your faith in the capacity of today's kids to face up to the daunting challenges of the twenty-first century. It works best if sessions are carefully integrated into an existing school programme, and if schools provide full background on the pupils involved. Small groups work better than large ones, and sessions need to be broken up into segments lasting less than an hour.

Tony

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