Follow the progress of our Year 8 students as they work towards winning the npower Climate Cops SOS challenge and travel to London to raise enviromental issues.

Currently 10 Year 8 students are working towards winning the npower Climate Cops SOS challenge. Calling themselves 'The M Team', students had to create a video showing an environmental problem the school had and suggest ways of tackling this. On the 14th of October the students travelled down to London to experience the npower 'Buzz Day' at the Globe Theatre where they met the opposition (9 other schools) and were inspired by Alastair Campbell, former advisor to Tony Blair and Konnie Huq, former Blue Peter presenter.

The event was created by npower so that it could make young people aware of environmental problems and create ideas of how to resolve them and help the environment and area. The video the students created was to show how the Academy uses far too much paper. All of the facts presented in the video were true. If the students can change the Academy's way of thinking from, 'There's paper there so I will use it' to 'Do I really need to print this off?', then we could save money and the environment at the same time. The npower team particularly liked the fact that our team want to reduce paper usage, not just recycle it and as a finalist school we won £1000 to fund our project and a free energy audit.

The competition has already given the students some amazing opportunities like going to Outward Bound in Ullswater for a week on a 'green' course and going to the Globe theatre London for two days. In March the students will travel down to London again for the final results. In the meantime, they are continuing to develop their strategy, objectives and tactics for solving the 'Paper Problem' and are holding meetings every Monday and Wednesday morning. We are currently busy trying to publicise our campaign and as well as speaking at staff briefing, we will be appearing at year group assemblies, writing to our local MPs, sending our press releases and writing further updates for the website. The more we can do, the stronger our final submission will be in March when we wait to see if we have won the top prize of £20,000 for the Academy.

By Aaron Lawson