Green Your Grounds

Adding new green spaces not only enhances the appearance of a school setting, generating new learning opportunities, but also creates new and diverse habitats enriching the local environment.

Autumn brings the start of the planting season and new opportunities to develop your school grounds. Trees and shrubs can be planted at any time of the year, but planting at this time of year generally leads to more effective establishment and can significantly reduce the cost of plants and planting with the availability of bare rooted nursery stock.

Planting projects can range from a few shrubs filling some gaps, to creating mini woodlands and hedge rows. One thing is for sure, every single new plant will create a habitat and limitless learning opportunities.

Getting good advice is so important when planning planting schemes and to get best value it helps if the school has an idea of budget in addition to the teaching, learning and environmental objectives. It is always good to have a master plan and will help to ensure that development is progressed in the most logical and cost effective way whilst enabling long term pre planning of budgets and schedules.

A master plan does not necessarily need to be anything too complicated, but should set out clearly what is hoped to be achieved. This planning is so important when firstly getting teachers excited about the potential projects and they in turn will of course share that enthusiasm with the children. Having clear objectives in place will also provide a great footing to enhance the possibly of getting support from the Local Authority, School Governors, The PTA, parents and other potential sponsors like local businesses who are often keen to support local community assets like schools. All can be key to getting the projects completed much sooner than you had anticipated.

Don’t be put off if you have little or no areas to plant trees and shrubs in the school grounds. Planters, roofs and walls can all provide great opportunities to create new green spaces. Dream big and collaborate with innovative school grounds specialists and dreams may soon become a reality.

Finding ways to spend big budgets is not difficult, but is generally not realistic either. We pride ourselves in providing schools with great advice and will always have no and low cost solutions for a range of ways to develop your school grounds, whilst also finding new ways that you can utilise your setting to generate new and exciting learning opportunities.

Before you spend any more on your school grounds, get in contact and will be more than happy to drop in to provide free and impartial solutions to help develop your school grounds.

Get in touch here: https://www.greatgrounds.co.uk/contact