Sustainability

The curriculum offered at ACS Cobham is aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

In Lower School, students can enjoy units of enquiry based on the 17 sustainable development goals created with the aim of ‘peace and prosperity for the people and the planet’ while tackling climate change and working to preserve oceans and forests.

In Senior School, students participate in the iCare course in Grades 7 and 8, and in Grades 9 and 10 they have the opportunity to do Service Learning within the local community. The AP and IB programmes offer further opportunities to learn about the local and global world.

We have had a student recently who conducted her AP Research on the quality of soil and the impact on it by humans.

Where possible we connect our teaching and learning with action. Some examples are:

The High School Gardening Club who have rehabilitated the soil behind the High School building following several years of construction work, revived the beds, weeded the ground, and planted flowers and vegetables. Wooden pallets and other materials discarded as waste were used to build their borders and flower beds.

The Lower school ‘ Jardin du Soleil’ is an outdoor learning place where our lower school students care for plants and vegetables and learn about plant eco-systems.

The Scouts club tidy up our paths around school, whilst other students are running a ‘thrift store’ to recycle no longer needed clothes and other items.

Bees are kept at school and honey is created and shared. The bees are so popular that there is now a waiting list to join the club, which educates students about beekeeping.

We support local schools by sharing our resources. As we were replacing some of our classroom furniture and library resources, we invited our partnership schools to come and take what they needed, helping to replenish and furnish their own classrooms and libraries.

ACS Cobham supports a global sustainability project, The Namibia Project, which is a High School project where we work directly with a partner school in Namibia to further develop ours, and their, sustainable knowledge and actions.

ACS Cobham has been shortlisted for the Jane Goodall Award for its work on their Middle School Garden, and we are a Green Flag Award School – an internationally recognised achievement for schools committed to Learning for Sustainability.