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Biodiversity

School grounds provide an ideal opportunity to introduce children to the natural environment and to biodiversity in a practical way. They offer a safe and potentially exciting facility for outdoor education that can complement classroom-based activities.

Biodiversity provides direct links to the curriculum, providing knowledge, skills and understanding across the key stages in the following areas:

  • Life processes
  • Humans and other animals
  • Green plants
  • Variation and classification, inheritance and evolution
  • Living things in their environment

 

Pupils learn that the variety of plants and animals that exist makes it important to identify them and assign them to groups; that different plants and animals are found in different habitats; that habitats support a diversity of plants and animals that are all interdependent; that the distribution and relative abundance of organisms in habitats can be explained using ideas of interdependence, adaptation, competition and predation.

Further information

Lots of Eco-Schools choose to address biodiversity as part of their Action Plan. Visit the Case Studies section for more details. It’s also worth visiting the Delivery Partners section for further information on how to increase biodiversity within your school grounds. The importance of Learning Outside the Classroom cannot be overestimated, and biodiversity offers valuable ways to engage young people in their local environment, providing a much more creative and stimulating learning environment. 

What is biodiversity?

Biodiversity - or "biological diversity" is the amazing variety of all living things on our planet - from plankton, wildflowers and insects to mammals, reptiles, trees and birds. It also applies to the habitats in which these living things are to be found - oceans, woodlands, meadows and wetlands, as well as man-made places such as fields, parks and canals. Even so-called ‘wasteland’ can be a rich source of biodiversity.

Why is biodiversity so important?

Biodiversity is essential because it impacts on all of our lives, both directly and indirectly.

All species, including humans, require a range of basic resources to keep them alive and healthy. Humans need oxygen to breathe, water to drink, food to eat and shelter from the weather. The living things on our planet provide many of these things for us, so their conservation is vital if we are to survive.

Preserving Planet Earth's biodiversity is also essential because:

  • no-one knows just what other benefits may be lost when species become extinct or what impact this will have on other species or habitats.
  • healthy natural ecosystems help control flooding, drought and soil erosion.
  • the quality of our lives is greatly enriched by the natural environment
  • all species have as much moral right to exist as humans.

Human life itself depends on the relationships between all living creatures and their environment, yet a lot of human activity is having a negative impact on biodiversity across the world. In the UK, the growth of urban development, intensive farming methods, the introduction of non-native species, transport and pollution has lead to huge habitat and species decline and in some cases, extinction. The need to restore this 'balance of nature' has never been so urgent.

What can schools do? 

Raise awareness throughout the school

Biodiversity has connections with all the different environmental strands that, drawn together, characterise a healthy and caring Eco School. An Eco-School can care for biodiversity in several ways:

  • By showing positive attitudes and values for the health and well-being of local habitats, plants and animals, as well as humans.
  • By encouraging the use of the outdoors to teach and learn about biodiversity.
  • By making choices that affect the use of natural resources.
  • By aiming to reduce its global footprint on habitats and species, both locally and globally.
  • By taking part in the BBC's Breathing Places programme.
  • By contacting one of our delivery partners (need hyper link to delivery partner such as the RSPB to take part in one of their programmes)

 

Link biodiversity work to the curriculum

School grounds provide an ideal opportunity to introduce children to the natural environment and biodiversity. They offer a fantastic facility for outdoor education that can complement classroom-based activities. Nature areas within a school's grounds can add greatly to this.

In addition to curricular links, biodiversity work can also offer pupils the opportunity to assist with the provision of reliable, quality data on habitats and species that is crucial to national and local biodiversity action planning. 

See also:

PRIMARY Level Biodiversity Topic

POST PRIMARY Level Biodiversity Topic

Further help

The Delivery Partners and School Grounds sections of this website contain further helpful information.

Does your school have a great idea for encouraging or monitoring biodiversity? If so, why not tell us about it? Contact us and we will share it with our network of Eco-Schools.