Special school growing for the future with tree planting event

The event, at the Keystone Academy in Shrewsbury, involved pupils, their families, and staff, working to plant hundreds of trees - all with the mission of improving the natural area at the school.

The Keystone Academy,  which is part of the YES Trust, opened its doors for the first time in September 2022, before moving into a purpose-built school in November 2023. 

This weekend's event was part of adding a host of trees to the site, with the intention of creating a woodland for the future.

Ali Bellaby, headteacher at the Keystone Academy, said they had been thrilled to see the school community coming together for the event.

She said: "It is the first SEMH (social, emotional and mental health) school in Shropshire that specifically looks at supporting young people with neuro-divergence so we are really delighted.

"We have only been open in our new school for 12 months, and we have got just about 120 kids on roll now so today is a really exciting day for us because the learning in the outdoors is so important to what I believe our children need in life, and opportunities to help them become great human beings I suppose, so developing this outdoor space is fantastic."

Nicole Jackson, Outdoor Studies Instructor who is leading the project, said: "It is delightful to be able to host this event, as Ali said our school has only been open for 12 months, and just in the last half term really we have really been working on developing our outdoor space, which finally is taking some sort of shape - as you can sort of see behind us.

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

"So today is our community tree planting day and we are planting around 370 different trees, a variety of different broadleaf trees which will really help increase the biodiversity of this area and it will kind of really help to take this area back to its sort of original ecology, which would have been woodland, but it has then been built on, so now we are helping just to sort of take it back to its original heritage, with our broadleaf trees.

"We have got a lot of hedges to lay as well, and I have also brought in today some slightly bigger trees as well so we can begin to sort of create a really thriving forest with different canopy layers as well.

"But it is wonderful we have got staff here, we have got pupils, pupils' families, so it is just a really exciting event."

The trees for the project were donated through a Woodland Trust initiative.