St. Brigid's Primary School Ballymoney has had a long tradition of promoting environmental awareness amongst pupils, staff and parents. When the school made the decision to apply for the Eco-Schools Green Flag it wanted to do this by promoting the types of learning endorsed by the Revised Primary Curriculum.

Like other schools in the programme, the school identified three targets: the first of which was to reduce waste in the school, secondly to develop global awareness of environmental issues amongst the school community and finally to promote healthy lifestyles.

The initial action planning for the school's green flag bid came form the School ECO Committee, which consisted of elected representatives from classes throughout the school as well as parents and members of staff. The committee very much promoted the new curriculum's emphasis on Thinking Skills & Personal Capabilities with the children Being Creative; using their Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making skills as well as being able to develop their personal capabilities through Working Together and Self Management.

This planning model was then cascaded to the year group level and led by the committee representatives in their own classroom. Each class drew up an action plan using an Assessment for Learning approach [again a theme of the revised primary curriculum], where the assessment strategy Two Stars and a Wish was used. The two stars represented things the school or class was doing well, with the wish being the environmental improvement that they planned to bring about.

Throughout the course of the project it was the children themselves who brainstormed the ideas and took responsibility for ensuring that they happened. As a result the ECO garden was created, a fashion show using recycled items took place for parents, fair trade products were bought for use in the school, eating fruit at breaktime rocketed, major education and fundraising activities were held for the developing world charity - Trócaire, recycling took place in each class and in all of these projects it was the children themselves who managed the process.

The Eco-Schools green flag bid also gave the school the opportunity to develop Information Communication Technology [ICT] for a real purpose. Each class uploaded their plans to the school's shared documents ICT platform so that everyone could see each others' plans and updates on their work. This simple initiative also avoided the unnecessary hard copying. Each class completed PowerPoint presentations based on their projects, used Microsoft Publisher for publicity releases, digital cameras to record their achievements as well as using data handling packages to represent statistical information. St. Brigid's PS also took a video diary of their ECO work using hand held Digi-Blu cameras. The development of children's skills in this project alone was extraordinarily successful because as well as promoting high levels of ICT skills [including editing and voice-overs] the children were just as importantly developing problem solving skills as well as their personal capability to self-manage their time and work co-operatively.

Mrs McNally, Vice-Principal and ECO Co-ordinator, summed up the school's evaluation of the project, "St. Brigid's PS, Ballymoney successful Eco-Schools Green Flag bid was very much a modern project aimed at nurturing traditional values of environmental improvement and healthy lifestyles. It is a wonderful programme which requires a great deal of work but is well worth it."