From Classroom to Countryside: Oakwood Specialist College Students and Protect Earth Unite for Hedgerow Planting

Protect Earth are more than enthusiastic to share natural spaces with the communities around our managed sites all over the UK. To say we were overjoyed when Oakwood Specialist College contacted us to spend some time with us planting hedgerows is an understatement.

We spoke with Oakwood's Head of Careers and Futures, Dan Miliffe, to understand more about what makes Oakwood Specialist College special and why their students came to spend time with us establishing new hedgerows on a farm not far from our flagship woodlands in Cornwall.

About Oakwood Specialist College

Oakwood Specialist College is a small specialised college with three campuses in southwest England. The college has 140 students aged 16-25. Their main goal is to help each student gain the knowledge and skills they need for life, both on their own and in the workforce. To develop students to have these skills, they offer personalised learning programs tailored to each student, covering the journey to adulthood, including job-related qualifications and work experience.

Oakwood Specialist College in the community

Dan and his team sit with each student to learn more about their goals while attending Oakwood. The team turns these conversations into work placements through communities with businesses aligned with students' career goals who are willing to support students by offering one day a week of work placements. Finding work placements for 140 students is no small task. But as Dan related, it's a two-pronged approach that sees the community help these students and, where possible, the college showing its gratitude by helping the community.

Oakwood enjoying time with Protect Earth

Not all Oakwood Specialist College’s students want to follow traditional career paths, and some wish to explore other avenues. The discussions with students encouraged Dan to look further afield at other opportunities he could contact to work together, which is how Protect Earth came onto his radar.

As Dan related, he wished he'd had more opportunities during his school years to experience more potential career paths and understand what suited him best. We both agreed being a race car driver would have been great, but we've found more fulfilling roles with far less environmental impact.

Dan reached out to Protect Earth, hoping to arrange time for some of his students to have an experience with us.

A few additional considerations come into play when working with youths and schools, including guardianship and accessibility. On every site we work on, Protect Earth writes a risk assessment. We shared these with the college, who used them as the basis for their own site evaluations.

We also spoke with Dan and the college about what some time with us would entail and what we could provide. We were excited enough to have a group of young adults come have fun with us that we were happy to accommodate as much as necessary.

The college has now arranged two separate sessions with us. The first saw 12 students participate in a planting session in 2022. We recently saw 5 students come to a farm near Liskeard, Cornwall. This latter session included an additional step of looping in the landowner, making sure they would also work within the college's requirements, which they were happy to do. Again, risk assessments were conducted, accessibility plans were created, and everything was put into place on the day so the students could spend time with us without having to think about anything more than simply enjoying the outdoors.

Speaking with Dan, he said the college's supervisors on site said the students enjoyed their day. More importantly, the students gained a sense of appreciation for the natural world with the seed planted in one or two students that ecology and outdoor work may suit them.

To sum up

For many reasons, it's important to Protect Earth to include community in what we do - mainly, there's strength in numbers, and without the community being aware of environmental needs, there won't be voices loud enough to protect it.

Involving students from Oakwood Specialist College was special and is a relationship that, now that it's established, we hope will continue offering mutual benefit.