Spain – Pilas
IES Virgen de la Soledad
Our school is Virgen de la Soledad. It is in Pilas, a town close to Seville in the South of Spain. We are 50 teachers and 600 students having compulsory and post-compulsory education and also professional training. Our students study English and most of them have French classes too. We are a committed group of teachers who are very interested in showing our students that there are many different ways of learning and who enhance them to equally do both theoretical and practical work. Besides, we can always count with the help of the rest of members of the school community when needed. The students´ families and the local authorities are very keen on working with us whenever it is required.
Our school is close to the biggest National Park in Europe (Doñana Park). Therefore, we are quite aware of the need to preserve and protect the environment. We have been involved in different programmes concerning environment protection for several years.
On the one hand, we have a recycling program in which all the members of the school community are involved. Thanks to it, we have considerably reduced the amount of waste which is produced in our school and also it is much cleaner than before.
On the other hand, we have a school orchard which grows more and more each year and students take care of it. Moreover, we have a course in professional training which is focused on physical activity in the countryside and the students who take part in it have subjects as horse riding and cycling.
Finally, we have recently finished an Erasmus project also focused on recycling, reusing and reducing (“Changing habits changing the world” 2017-2019, so we are used to working with this topic and our intention is to keep working in that sense. Working in this project has been an amazing experience for all the school community since it has given us the chance to improve our cultural and linguistic skills. Moreover, we have achieved further knowledge of the risks that we take if we don´t pay a bigger attention to the environmental needs.