Making sense of our school's carbon footprint

This activity will give older children the opportunity to think more fully about  their school's carbon contribution and to understand where their school fits into the wider picture of the UK's electricity generation and greenhouse gas emissions.


This task uses up-to-the-minute emissions data from the UK electricity grid and from your own school.

This chart shows your school's carbon emissions over the last few years and how they compare to regional, national and  exemplary schools.

The following graphs use your school's electricity data and may be useful for challenging the pupils to generate and answer their own questions and analyses about the data.

This chart shows your school's electricity consumption in kWh over the last few years, with the average UK grid carbon intensity on the second y axis.

This second chart shows your school's carbon emissions from electricity.

The chart below shows the carbon emissions from electricity consumption of your school over the last year.

The graph below shows the carbon emissions (bar charts. Left hand axis) from your school as a result of electricity consumption over the last week, versus the carbon intensity of the National Electricity Grid (line, right hand axis).

 You can compare this with your electricity consumption (in on this chart) over the last week.