Eye on Education: Hillside Primary School

Oct 6 2010 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

IT’S the newest and the greenest school in Kirklees.

And Hillside Primary School headteacher Dawn Horton and her staff are celebrating their first year in the building.

Mrs Horton said: “It’s been an exciting and very busy first year but we feel the transition for children, parents and staff has been exceedingly smooth and relatively trouble-free.

“We are looking forward to making the education of our children even more exciting during the next few years.”

The school has the greenest credentials, indeed BBC weatherman Paul Hudson, who officially opened the building in June this year named it at the greenest school in Yorkshire, a claim which has yet to be challenged.

The £7.4m school, off Headfield Road, opened to its 320 pupils in November.

It is the most environmentally friendly within Kirklees – solar panels, a wind turbine, a biomass boiler using compressed wood pellets and a special system to recycle water will all ensure this is an energy efficient school which creates 55% of its own electricity.

Awards for its building and design and greenness have flown freely with it being particularly proud to receive Kirklees’s Arthur Halliwell Award for Sustainable Development.

At ground level, children have celebrated a bumper harvest with their fruit and vegetable growing for their first season with carrots, courgettes, lettuce, peas, potatoes and marrows. This will be celebrated later this month with a harvest fair and a scarecrow making competition.