Our pupils play a genuine, hands-on role in protecting and improving the environment, both on our estate and in the wider community. The core of our sustainability education is our forest school provision and our reputable Keys Diploma, through which children take part in projects such as building bee gardens, planting wildflower meadows, creating wildlife habitats and harvesting home-grown vegetables from their own plots.

Our pupil-led Eco Warriors continue to champion practical, meaningful change across the school. In one recent initiative, they toured the school’s biomass site alongside our Maintenance Manager to gain a real understanding of how energy is produced and managed on site. Inspired by what they learned, successfully encouraged the Estates team to reduce the heating temperature by one degree across the school, a small but tangible step in reducing our carbon footprint.

Outdoor learning is woven into everyday school life. Pre-prep pupils have enjoyed dedicated wellbeing days exploring the school’s wellbeing garden, observing the insects visiting plants and the creatures living in the soil, and creating artwork from branches, leaves and mud gathered on site. Year 7 and Year 8 pupils take physical education into the woods, with cross-country running through the school’s natural landscape building both fitness and a genuine connection with the outdoors.

This culture of pupil ownership was central to our achieving the Woodland Trust’s Gold Award, recognition that reflects a whole-school culture in which the natural world sits at the very heart of school life and to the enthusiasm of pupils who have genuinely taken ownership of their environment, a spirit we want them to carry with them long after they leave us.

We are proud to be part of the South Downs National Park. In 2018, the Highfield Estate Plan was endorsed by the South Downs National Park Authority, the governing body of Britain’s newest national park. Our plan ensures that any future developments of the school site provide a net benefit to the biodiversity of the area.

The 175 acres of the school site form part of a much wider estate of 517 acres. Our current Estate Plan is a ten-year strategy running to 2028, setting out how we will continue to improve our ecology, woodlands and sustainability. The overarching vision for the whole estate is to conserve and enhance the landscape’s natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage. As we approach the end of this plan, we are already looking ahead to the next phase of our estate strategy, ensuring our long-term ambitions for the site continue to build on the progress made so far.

Being part of the national park fulfils our school vision in many ways, including providing an inspiring backdrop to your child’s school life and an inspirational learning environment, both for their core curriculum and their extensive extra-curricular programme. We believe we can enhance our educational value and its broader ecological and amenity value to meet the goals of the national park, while at the same time offering the highest quality of education to your child.

Active, growing children need plenty of nutritious food to fuel them throughout the day. As well as ensuring your child has something satisfying to eat, we support ethical buying, using locally-grown and environmentally-sustainable produce wherever possible. To make the best use of fresh food, our menus are linked to the seasons, and our lunch menus are checked and certified by a registered dietician against the Department for Education’s School Food Standards.

We work closely with carefully selected suppliers who meet the highest standards, requiring full traceability, clear allergen information and comprehensive food labelling. We maximise the use of natural ingredients while eliminating genetically modified foods and harmful additives, and our food provision prioritises whole, nutrient-dense ingredients, excluding processed and ultra-processed foods wherever possible. Added sugars are limited throughout the day, and our desserts are prepared using reduced-sugar recipes wherever possible, guided by our registered dietician.

I think it would be worth including the fact we have allergy champions here, you would need to check with Sarah G or Marco as to how many

Our dedicated Catering Department continues to eliminate single-use plastic around the school. We use fully-compostable cutlery made from 100% renewable resources, and clear Bioware cups made of corn starch that are compostable and biodegradable, in place of disposable plastic. Any waste generated is sent to our recycling depot, where it is sorted appropriately.

Our boarding community has led a school-wide drive to reduce food waste, inspired by their studies of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal on responsible consumption and production. Food waste is carefully monitored and logged by the catering team, with bins weighed after every service. Since the initiative began, weekly food waste has fallen by 21%, while chef’s waste has dropped by 22%. The catering team has creative ways to repurpose surplus food, from turning leftover bananas into smoothies and banana bread, to using the flesh of carved Halloween pumpkins for soup and the seeds for homemade bread.