Clean Air Project

At St Mary’s school, we believe that every child should be able to live and work happily and healthily. As a Church school, we believe that one of our responsibilities as human beings is to care for God’s creation, so that everyone can enjoy it safely.

 

‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.’ Genesis 2:15

 

Very sadly, the location of St Mary’s school has the highest recorded levels of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) of any school in London, due to its location next to the Marylebone Road. This is very worrying to us because of what it means for our pupils, staff and whole community.

 

We are therefore highly vigilant in protecting our pupils from toxic air and are always looking for ways to combat the effects of air pollution, and lobby those in power to make changes.

 

You can find out more about air pollution in this helpful video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39170488

 

What are we doing about this and how effective has it been?

Our children have put together their own video about what they have been doing about this issue and what you can do to help:

We have been encouraged that our internal monitoring of air quality (June 2017) shows that air quality within the school site is now below the legal limit of 40μg/m³, despite being so close to Marylebone Road, which has levels in excess of 100μg/m³. This is, in part, due to the substantial greening of our school playground and grounds, something we are keen to extend throughout our site. We are still concerned, though, about parts of our school that are directly facing the road, about many of our children’s routes to school which involve crossing roads with illegal levels of pollution, and about the places where our families live.

 

We have now achieved TfL’s Gold STARS award for our work in this field, as well as our school’s approach to sustainable travel.

 

We monitor the pollution levels daily. Check out today’s pollution levels on this helpful map from DEFRA.

 

Money for the Garden

 

If you would like to make a donation towards our Garden Project, please contact Ms Cahill at the school office: office@stmbs.org.uk

 

Sustainable Travel Options

 

Please try and travel to, and around, our school in the most sustainable way possible. If you can, please walk or take public transport. We highly recommend walking on side streets, and NEVER on Marylebone Road if you can help it. You can find low pollution routes here: https://walkit.com/cities/london/ Here is an example of the route from Baker Street station to St Mary’s school: walkit