Creating Value In Schools
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In the podcast From prom shop to polytunnel: sustaining eco-activity in school, Wendy Litherland explains how her school went from jumble-bags of donated school uniform to an enticing pre-loved offer and prom shop. What steps can you take to make your uniform offer more sustainable, accessible and attractive?
The pre-loved uniform came first. It came from our lost property and started off looking like a jumble sale. When lost property had been left long enough and no one had claimed it, we washed it, cleaned it, sorted it, and put it on for sale or gifting.
We’ve gone full circle now, from ‘here’s an extra jumper you can have, put it away quickly’, to actually having a room. We won a competition from Let’s Go Zero to refurbish the room, so with Ikea’s help, we could go from a groggy room to having a shop – with an external entrance for the parents, so that they can open on weekends.
The children now just donate their clothes as a matter of habit. So there's no shame now; it used to be undercover, ‘Here you are Miss, you can have a bag of clothes,’ and now it's quite proud. Everyone will drop things off and children don’t worry about visiting because it looks like a shop. Our new parents will frequently stock out their children's equipment. So we're really happy with that.
And then it evolved – because we have a prom. The children were saying, ‘We're buying these prom dresses, but what are we going to do with them afterwards?’
Now we've got something like 200 prom dresses and some suits. And the shop is open for the whole community, so any of the local secondary schools can benefit. We do a buy for something like £25 pounds, which covers things like the cleaning costs, and then a hire. So it's ridiculously cheap.
We also do evenings, where we'll have a little bit of fake fizz with the students, music and things like that. So we do really try and the children do respond well.
It's taken a cycle of maybe 10 years to get that. Things don't happen overnight! And that's one thing people need to remember. You've got to be in this for the long haul.
I was lucky to have the PTA’s backing; obviously the senior management team and the school were open to that, because at first, it did look like a jumble sale, and it wasn't very appealing to look at a pile of clothes. And then it's gone on, and on, and on again.
We didn't have any storage space before we had this room. We managed to get some big industrial hanger things, and the caretakers used to wheel them around for us into different places, and we used to hide them behind the stage and various places because my school, like most, will have very limited storage space.
So again, when you're looking for things like this, it's where do you put it? Ideas are great, but you often can't find a place for it.
Time is crucial; you have to have everything sorted and sized. And it grows – we have things like revision books and equipment in there as well now. Trainers, everything's in there.
But, every donation – which is welcomed – has to be sorted. And somebody has to help with that. At times it was me after school, and anyone I could convince to help me. Now it does run itself because the staff and the PTA have fully got it under control.
So it's really impressive when you see that the parents run this themselves in their own time. They’re all working parents as well. This is not an affluent area where we're all sitting at home. They go out of their way to do this.
Listen to the full podcast with Wendy Litherland (36 minutes)
