When the weather is good, students at Galway Community College (GCC) are brought five minutes across the road to the shore of Lough Atalia.
There, an outdoor classroom is fashioned from a kit containing binoculars, bug collectors, clipboards, magnifying glasses and a portable blackboard. It is one of four such kits for schools in the city, positioned in areas rich in biodiversity.
“We have a big focus on the local, natural environment and trying to keep our school green but also using our outdoor facilities here,” says GCC vice principal Tom Flanagan. “A lot of schools have to travel quite far to go to outdoor educational centres. We have these natural amenities on our doorstep.”
A Deis school that facilitates second-level, further education and part-time adult students, GCC has long been a champion of green issues. Streams of second-level students and adults are generally kept separate, but they work on some common projects such as the school’s green programme.
Lough Atalia is one of Galway’s Special Areas of Conservation and it is central to how GCC operates. Particularly for disadvantaged students, Mr Flanagan believes the area greatly improves the teaching of the science curriculum and helps to convey environmental messages.
“Some of our students are not the most academic,” he says. “Whereas, if you can bring the learning to life in real-life, important projects like the green initiative and the Lough Atalia project, it makes education and teaching all that much easier. The students really enjoy the hands-on projects that we do.”
The Lough Atalia project, as he puts it, is an effort to rewild part of the local area. Over the last few years, a 8-hectare (20-acre) site owned by GCC, and previously rented out to farmers for grazing cattle, has slowly been returning to its natural state. Nicky Cavalleri is a science teacher at the school.
“It took a couple of years there for the grass to grow and you could see where the different spaces were,” he says. “With that, the wildlife started to come back into the area. I was working with transition years (TYs) at the time and we put together a species display board so when you arrive down there, there’s a space now with our outdoor classroom where you can look and see what sorts of species are around.
“At different times of the year, some flowers are in bloom and there are different plants. A little bit of information is on a board down there so you can look. It just makes it a focal point of somewhere to go and a good starting point to get the interest of people.”
The hope is that eco projects like this one can instil a long-term interest in green issues. Historically, the number of students progressing to third-level education from GCC has been relatively low, but that is improving.
Civic and environmental action could act as catalysts for academic performance. In recent years, another significant step for the school was a three-year Erasmus+ Programme that linked GCC with schools in Spain and Croatia.
TY students researched endangered species and ended up having their work published by the Irish Wildlife Trust in an annex to their magazine. They even managed to deliver some of their findings to the local mayor and city councillors.
“The project was grounded in climate change but after studying all these species, really a huge factor as big as climate change was habitat loss,” Mr Cavalleri says. “Students could see that habitat loss on land, overfishing in the sea – stuff like that had probably more of an impact than actual climate change on species.
“I hope that it has stimulated further interest. When they start having an impact on their local areas as they get older and progress through life, hopefully this will stick with them.”
Visiting Erasmus students were also part of the rewilding effort, helping to plant native species in Lough Atalia. Sean O’Loughlin, who has taught at GCC since 1996, thinks access to a wild, dynamic habitat in a city area makes a huge difference to students.
“When they come back in 20 years’ time, they’ll be saying that’s the forest I planted,” he says of the Erasmus students. “We’re planting for future generations really.
“To plant with native plants is the key to it really. It’s on the shore of Lough Atalia so plants that will survive the weather and the seaside – that’s the key to it. When you have your native plants down, biodiversity will improve dramatically. We kind of let nature do its job. We only visit it a few times in the year for maintenance.”
“You don’t have to be maintaining it; it doesn’t have to be pristine. There’s no lawn or grass because grass is the worst thing you can have in your garden. There’s very little life in grass. There’s real life over there in Lough Atalia.”
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