In the war years from 1914-1945, new mothers were obliged to be very thrifty, sharing and making do due to shortages and rationing. Nursery World ran classified adverts including, for example, an S.O.S. for maternity and baby clothes, which received over 70 replies offering such things as a complete layette, ‘expanding skirt that would fit an average-sized elephant’, and a ‘200 year-old christening robe’.
These days we use Vinted and similar, Facebook marketplace, free ads and charity shops, etc. to resource our nurseries, and can take pride in the fact that we are not only saving money but also reducing waste going to landfill.
Some of our nurseries go further than this and arrange clothes, books, boots and toy donations/libraries, and even food banks.
Nursery World, 9 July 1964
In among ‘Nursery Topics of the Week’ in December 1942 was an article about using coupon-free materials such as braids, ribbons, hessian and canvas for home-made presents, which would be ‘nicer and less expensive’ (pictured right). These days, many of us are lucky to be able to buy resources from a local scrap store, such as Children's Scrapstore, that supplies safe surplus stock.
And then our children can make wonderful junk models, offering them decision-making and creative opportunities.
DFE STRATEGY
The Sustainability and climate change strategy, published in 2022, sets out a number of initiatives with the aim of helping education leaders plan for embedding sustainability and acting to help them to deliver against those plans.
The strategy covers all stages of the education system, including early years. In practice, sustainability needs embedding in all staff job descriptions and training so that every decision takes sustainability into account, just as it does for health and safety. Children will also benefit from Greening Every Curriculum (UNESCO, 2024), which is calling for 90 per cent of countries to have a green national curriculum by 2030.
Green skills encompass the knowledge, abilities, values and attitudes needed to live in, develop and support a sustainable and environmentally friendly society.
The Department for Education also encourages the education sector to develop a climate action plan, which sets out a holistic approach to enable an education setting to progress its sustainability journey. To support education settings with their climate action plan, the department has commissioned Sustainability Support for Education, which provides tailored signposting to ensure settings are directed to relevant, quality-assured support reflecting their individual context (such as their priorities, size or sustainability maturity), enabling them to take their first steps or to take their ambitions to the next level. With nurseries such as Tops Day Nurseries having been net zero carbon since November 2023, our sector is well along the path compared with the DfE (aiming to be carbon-neutral in 2050), perhaps because we recognise that the youngest children have the most to lose if we delay.
The DfE has also funded the Climate Ambassadors scheme, which provides local expert support and peer-to-peer (volunteer) learning opportunities, which early years settings are able to access.
The DfE strategy is that all education settings will have nominated a sustainability lead and put in place a climate action plan by 2025. This is not being inspected by Ofsted or anyone else currently, but all the larger groups employing 250 staff or more will already have completed an Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme Report (required since 2014) so have had this in place for ten years already.
