Foundation Principal's Message

As we come to the end of the Advent term, I write to wish you all well for the Christmas period.

Looking forward to the New Year, we will be publishing two key documents in January:

Princethorpe Foundation Strategic Plan – this aims to give you a “behind the scenes” look at the more business-related aspects of the Foundation which support the education of all our pupils.
Princethorpe Foundation Sustainability Plan – which will highlight where we are with our work on sustainability and reducing our carbon footprint and our future aspirations and targets.

I hope that both plans will be of interest and I will be seeking feedback. One section of the sustainability plan looks at our transport to/from our schools and the associated carbon footprint. We have undertaken a huge amount of work on this, much of which was based on surveys which many of you completed – thank you!

I recently shared some of the results of these transport surveys with pupils so I would like to share these with you here.

In all, we had 651 responses from pupils, parents and staff. This gave us a massive amount of data regards:

General habits of our community when travelling to/from our schools;
Distances of car and bus journeys to/from school;
Types of cars used to drive to/from school.

By processing all this information we have been able to calculate a good estimate of the overall carbon footprint due to travel to/from school in 2023 which was 885 tonnes of CO₂.

This equates to 0.65 tonnes CO₂ per pupil over the course of the year.

Our aim will be to reduce our global carbon footprint in a variety of ways over the year/s ahead and there are a few observations from the travel survey:

At Princethorpe College, around 60% of pupils are regular bus users.
The total carbon footprint of the regular bus users is roughly 30 tonnes of CO₂ per year less than regular car users.
A 10% swing from cars users to buses would reduce the carbon footprint by roughly 75 tonnes of CO₂ per year.
Lift-sharing can have a big effect in reducing the overall carbon footprint.
There has been a move away from diesel (35%) and petrol engines (36%) towards electric and hybrid cars (29%).

Clearly getting our baseline data is only a first step and we will be saying more about our plans next term, but I hope this is of interest to us all.

Finally, I wish all families a peaceful Christmas and ask that you keep in your thoughts and prayers all members of our community, and communities across the world, who have very difficult circumstances to cope with as we enter the festive period.

Ed Hester
Foundation Principal