Embedding sustainability across the D&T curriculum 

Right, just briefly. Departmental aims, sustainability is ingrained in at least two of them, along with confidence, experimentation and fun. Every year, I make sure all those aspects are covered through various different projects. So, one project might be really good at covering one thing, that’s okay, and you can get round all of them over the whole year through different bits and pieces.

At Highgate because I was in the fortunate position of teaching from Reception to Year 13, I managed to create a really cool curriculum that integrated loads of different things. At Charterhouse I’m almost there because we start at Year 9, I’m having to work with a lot of feeder schools, so I’m currently working with some schools in Surrey to try to get some commonality in the curriculum. But here’s an idea of how sustainability can go all the way through. Don’t read it now but that’s basically some thoughts on how you could embed sustainability throughout the curriculum from Key Stage 1 to 5.

Here’s an idea: should every outcome be recyclable? Here's an idea of a GCSE example with a bit of Vex 3D printing, basically a table tennis ball launcher with moving parts. The idea is we can recycle the 3D print back into filament, and with robotics you can just reassemble it over and over. I remember the idea of trying to shift away from products that end up in landfill. I wonder how many of our products actually end up in landfill, with all the materials combined in ways that are probably hard to recycle. So that’s just an idea of how you can approach every project, and I’d say we’re about 70% of the way there at Charterhouse. Everything can be taken apart and reused over and over.

Here are some ideas for robotics. There’s a poster linking to “design a robot that can collect plastic in the sea”, so anything you do can link to sustainability. I’ve worked with all these schools in Surrey to try and embed robotics, but also have a sustainability angle in every competition they take part in.

In the department, every material that comes in has a route out. We get the students to carefully separate their waste, and what I’m trying to reduce is what goes in the black bin over there. For example, our plastic goes in the red one. We can shred them up, press it back into sheets and injection mold it into products. You may have seen Rory’s work. He does some great work with his machines and molds. We basically have loads of them, all branded, and a lot of the students at Charterhouse make money selling the products as an entrepreneurial business. So the idea is to turn this waste into some profit. We also get local schools bringing their waste into the department. They shred it up and make products for their school, which they can sell in their schools. If you check out Rory, he’s doing some great work.

Other things: we get students coming in and making wind turbines and solar torches. Kitronik is also really good for this.

This is at Highgate. We managed to collect yoghurt pots and turn them into combs. When students put their trays back, they clear their waste and put the yoghurt pots in one container. The dining room then puts them through the washing machines to clean them, the idea of cleaning the plastic was the difficult part and de-labelling it but that's quite good.

There’s also the idea of students basically funding themselves, because these molds are quite expensive. The idea is, “Okay, if you give me this, I can get a new mold and make sunglasses.” So it gets the students involved in generating money for these molds.

Repair cafés work really well. Staff and students come in and we repair their products, and we have this little poster around. It’s quite nice, and we work with the repair café in Godalming. Then there are recycling trips: go to the recycling centre, take parts out, and upcycle them into a product.

Dyson did a really cool clean air monitor. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but they send you this and you can monitor particulates, carbon dioxide and all these bits and pieces. The students examined what the air was like on a normal day, and then on National Clean Air Day we then got the monitors out and this was in North London, so it was really nice to compare the differences. That's a way for students to learn about programming and systems, and then they presented their findings in an assembly.

We turned a bike into a way of recharging a phone, which was pretty fun. Anybody in school can burn some calories and recharge their phone. That was really good fun.

Okay, this is my best Instagram post I’ve ever done, so please do admire the amount of time this took me. Basically, we made the old stools into trophies. I won’t read it now, but hopefully you can appreciate it took me a lot of time, especially the Chopin - Chop-in. You can read it as bedtime reading later on.

You may be aware of Greenpower Goblins. We made the casing from old French oral tapes we found in the bin and these are on paper that the school got rid of, so we turned the bodywork into a recycling project, which was kind of fun. The kids also took inspiration from the Design Museum, so you can kind of see how it all comes together.

We also made rechargeable chargers built into objects. The idea isn’t ours, but there’s a really good resource on this, and all the students can charge their phones that way as well. Bamboo bike: we started growing bamboo so we can make materials, and bits and pieces like that. A bee-brick stuck on the wall.

This is an example of a student who went through the whole process. Her GCSE project was a bike-powered charging system. She did an upcycling project from an old aeroplane. Her A level project scans the barcode off a wrapper and tells you what section of the bin to put it in, which is kind of fun. Then she went off and did a degree in environmental engineering and a master’s at Cambridge, and she’s wonderful. There’s a great little video here, talks about her project and interviewing how, because she was a product of that curriculum from Reception right through to A level, so producing these things. Thank you very much.