Parents & carers

We do not expect schools to be totally plastic free. Our aim is to free where we live from single-use plastic: the avoidable stuff that’s everywhere. Things like plastic drinks bottles, disposable coffee cups, sachets, bathroom plastics, excessive food packaging, takeaway containers etc. These are the things that are having a huge impact on our environment and which we can make changes in our lives to eliminate. Take a look at our list of ‘The Offenders’ for the kind of items we mean. It’s time to kick our single-use addiction.

Plastic Free Schools is a pupil led initiative designed to help guide your school through the process of ditching single-use plastic, from conducting a single-use plastic audit at your school, to challenging government and industry and removing single-use plastic items from your school for good. The first step is for your school to sign up to the programme via our website so that we can send you a Plastic Free Schools pack.

In your Plastic Free Schools pack, you will receive five objective cards for the school to follow in order to reach Plastic Free Schools Status. You will also receive everything you need for a clean-up including sacks and gloves

As your school completes the objectives, all you need to do is provide us with photographic evidence and short updates on each objective. Once you’ve completed everything your school will achieve Plastic Free Schools Status and you will have been part of an incredible movement all across the country to eradicate single-use plastic from our schools and our environment.

To help schools tackle the use of single-use plastics in schools, we have designed a pupil-led programme called Plastic Free Schools. It will help you guide your nursery or school through the process of ditching single-use plastic, from conducting a plastic audit at your school, to challenging government and industry and removing single-use plastic items from your school for good.

Because we are such a small team here in the office and are unable to attend one off talks and events, we have developed our Plastic Free Schools programme which enables us to engage with hundreds of schools all across the country. to inspire pupils to tackle single-use plastic. Plastic Free Schools is a pupil-led initiative designed to help guide schools through the journey of eradicating single-use plastics.
We also have an amazing team of volunteer Regional Reps and volunteer Plastic Free Community leaders. Look for your local volunteer on our website or email us to see if they can attend your event.

This programme has been designed for nurseries and schools and, at present, cannot be completed by other groups of young people. However, we are excited that you want to tackle single-use plastic in your group and we encourage you to use the resources on our website as a source of inspiration and get involved in our events too.