Action Plan

The Action Plan aims to identify manageable and realistic targets and goals and provide a structured timetable for the reduction of the environmental impacts identified in the Environmental Review.

Whether your school is at Bronze, Silver or Green Flag level your Action Plan must be shared with the whole school community.

The Action Plan should be developed using the results of your Environmental Review. It should list a number of agreed environmental objectives, along with deadlines and clear delegation of responsibilities for each step. This is an opportunity to link this element to the curriculum.

It is important that you set realistic and achievable targets. Try not to be over ambitious; Rome was not built in a day.  The Eco-Schools programme is flexible and can be tailored to meet the needs of individual schools.

Take each step and apply it effectively to your situation. Do not be tempted to be too ambitious at first as failure is very de-motivating.  If your Environmental Review has shown that your school needs to set lots of targets, do not feel that you have to tackle them all at once – take each identifiable task, prioritise them by dividing them into what is achievable in the short, medium and longer term.

The Action Plan is the core of the Eco-Schools programme. It is a timetabled series of specific goals for improvement over a fixed time scale. Quantifiable targets should be set where possible e.g. 50% reduction in waste in 6 months, 100% recycling of cans sold in 8 months, 10% reduction in electricity consumption from previous year, etc.

It should always be developed from the results of the review. A sample action plan excerpt describes the actions taken by a school to achieve their goal (i.e. recycle all cans sold in the school by July of that year) in a clearly defined step by step process.

The planning process...

An Action Plan template is available for download for guidance on how the following information can be presented.  An Eco-Schools Officer is always available to offer help and advice if needed.
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Collate the results from your Environmental Review. Pick out topics that you want to tackle, e.g. litter or school grounds.  Decide what kind of action you can take to improve these issues.

Further resources are available in the Ten Topics section of this website. There are also links to Eco-Schools Partner Organisations who are available to help you with your chosen topics.

Decide how you will measure success in achieving your objectives. Make sure it is something that you can measure, e.g. if tackling energy, your measure could be a reduction in the school's energy consumption. Regular meter readings will provide this information. You could also measure the amount of litter picked up at each litter pick event. or  the frequency of various types of litter being collected.

Negotiate timescales for each action applying realistic and feasible deadlines.

Decide who is to be responsible for each action. Wherever possible, this should involve pupils.

Include a section for monitoring any financial costs you may incur with your activities.

NB: For further information on monitoring and evaluation, please see the monitoring and evaluation section under each of the Ten Topics.

Bronze
  • An environmental group decides on some action for the school based on an informal review.
  • Responsibility for taking action is agreed.
Silver
  • Eco-Committee draws up a plan for environmental action.
  • Action Plan includes specific targets with a time-frame for completion.
  • A range of action is planned covering more than one aspect of environmental management.
Green
  • The Action Plan is included in the school development plan.
  • Pupils on the Eco-Committee take responsibility for leading some action areas.
  • The Action Plan prioritises targets.
  • The Action Plan shows cost implications and includes how activity will be monitored and evaluated.