Shrewsbury SEN School Plant Trees To Help with Learning and Grow Their Community's Future

Transcript

00:00Hi there, my name's Ali Bellaby, I'm the head teacher here at the Keystone Academy.

00:05It's the first SEMH school in Shropshire that specifically looks at supporting young people with neurodivergence.

00:14So we're really delighted, we've only been opening our new school for 12 months and we've got 120 kids just about on roll now.

00:23So today's a really exciting day for us because the learning in the outdoors is so important to what I believe our children need in life

00:34and opportunities to help them become great human beings I suppose.

00:39So developing this outdoor space is fantastic and I'd really like to introduce my colleague Nicole, our outdoor ed instructor,

00:46who's been really instrumental in organising today's event.

00:49It's delightful to be able to host this event. As Ali said, our school's only been open for 12 months

00:55and part of just in the past half term really we've really been working on developing our outdoor space

01:01which finally is taking some sort of shape as you can sort of see behind us.

01:06It started with our roundhouse and now that's built we can work a little bit more on the landscape.

01:12So today is our community tree planting day and we're planting around 370 different trees,

01:19a variety of different broadleaf trees which will really help increase the biodiversity of this area

01:26and it'll kind of really help to take this area back to its sort of original ecology which would have been woodland

01:33but it's then been built on and so now we're helping just to sort of take it back to its original heritage with our broadleaf trees.

01:40We've got a lot of hedges to lay as well and I've also brought in today some slightly bigger trees as well

01:45so we can begin to sort of create a really thriving forest with different canopy layers as well.

01:51But it's wonderful, we've got staff here, we've got pupils, we've got pupils' families

01:55so it's just a really exciting event to share what we do and what we're about.