Good practice:

Orchard and educational program in a primary school

Within the “Orchard and educational program in a primary school” at Cristobal Colón, Valladolid (6 to 12 years old), an orchard was established to engage students, families, and the neighbourhood. FPNCyL, which is part of the regional government in Castilla y León, approached the school with the idea to renaturalise the schoolyard by creating urban farming infrastructures. It responds to the social and environmental vulnerability of children in old schools where open spaces and playgrounds were designed without vegetation. Other problems addressed are a lack of motivation and the economic and family problems of students (like nutritional patterns of children).
19 fruit trees, 54 berry shrubs, 16 aromatic shrubs, 8 orchard planters and 7 orchards have been planted. The main educational objective is to use schoolyard facilities (garden, fruit hall) to generate new learning scenarios for all ages. Children can learn in an experiential, emotional and cooperative way mathematics, physics, English, art, and other cross-cutting issues such as healthy eating, energy efficiency and climate change and food resilience. Activities like calculation of the volume of water for irrigation, the volume of land needed, probability of success of the seeds used, diversity of materials, how to make budgets... have been performed.
The school Cristobal Colón is now part of the municipal network of school gardens and has contacted local fruit canning companies to produce jam from yard fruits.

- budget for the building works in the schoolyard: 37.000 €
- human resources: 2 persons from FPNCyL working at 20% of their time for 6 months
- a team of teachers (without special training) from the school and a technician from FPNCyL (to constantly support teachers)

The annual report of the management of the centre shows that truancy has decreased 75% at the beginning of this school season to 60% at the mid and 40% at the end. These figures reflect the project’s positive effect on children, however the factor COVID is also influencing truancy.
Furthermore, agreements with local population have been made to take care of the orchards and fruit trees during the summer period. Neighbourhood cooperation has also improved the coexistence of the population.

One of the greatest challenges was to involve the entire educational community (students, teaching teams, families), to reduce high rates of truancy and transfer the practical knowledge of sustainable living from school to families and the community (characterized by high risk of social exclusion).

Having natural elements in schoolyards of cities allows students to be in contact with nature and rural areas, integrating environmental and agricultural values. It can improve motivation, coexistence, and learning.
To transfer this experience to other regions in which the schools are mainly done of concrete like in Spain can be very satisfactory. In Spain there are several networks of schools which include agriculture in their educational programmes, and it would be very interesting to create an international network to share experiences between teachers and students of different regions/ countries.
The project has been an inspiring one and will be replicated by the ERDF Regional Operational Programme of Castilla y León with the contribution of REACT-EU funds in the period 2021/2023 with a total budget of 4.000.000 € to transform more than 40 schoolyards to increase climate and food resilience of children by urban farming.