Walk into almost any school that is taking sustainability seriously and you will find the same things: a recycling scheme, a switch-off week, an eco-committee, perhaps meat-free Mondays or a ban on single-use plastics.
These are good. They build a culture, they engage pupils, and climate education is a genuine part of what the DfE expects. But if the goal is to reduce carbon, it is worth being honest that these actions are small, and that the ones which would make a real difference tend to be the ones schools put off.
The straightforward truth is that the biggest carbon savings in a school come from a short list of unglamorous, capital-heavy decisions: getting visibility of your energy data, decarbonising heat, and buying renewable electricity. A gas-heated school can run an excellent recycling scheme and still have made little dent in its emissions, because the vast majority of those emissions come from the boiler.
Why do the small actions win the attention? Because they are visible, affordable and rewarding, and because staff and pupils can drive them directly, without a capital budget or an estates decision. The high-impact actions are the opposite: they are invisible to pupils, they cost money, and they are usually controlled by whoever holds the energy contract and the estates budget, not by the person writing the plan. So they slip down the list.
There is a simple way to reorder priorities. First, you cannot reduce what you cannot see, so a baseline and regular visibility of your energy data come before anything else. Then heat, which is almost always the single largest lever, and increasingly the clearest one: grid electricity has now fallen below natural gas per unit of energy, so moving off gas and onto an efficient heat pump reduces carbon rather than simply shifting it. Then renewable generation, sized once demand has been minimised. Engagement and behaviour sit alongside all of this, not instead of it.
This is not an argument against the recycling scheme. Keep it. It is an argument for being clear about what “doing well” means. The measure is not how many actions are on the list. It is whether the handful of actions that actually reduce carbon are being addressed, or quietly deferred year after year.
How Nero can help
We help schools and trusts see exactly where their emissions come from and build a plan that puts effort where the carbon is, so enthusiasm turns into measurable results.
To find out where your biggest savings sit, get in touch
