Sustainability in the Early Years
Complete our course and lead your nursery in creating sustainable impact and nurturing young minds to care for the planet.
We are incredibly proud to announce that we have been awarded the prestigious King’s Award for Enterprise in Sustainable Development.
This honour is a testament to the dedication of our teams across 40 London nurseries. It affirms that our commitment to sustainability, social justice, and educational excellence is shaping the future of the Early Years sector.
How LEYF is leading the way
- Social justice model: LEYF’s innovative cross-subsidy model ensures that up to 35% of nursery places are fully subsidised for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
- Comprehensive Sustainability Strategy: Our work is guided by three key pillars: economic prosperity, social equity, and environmental integrity.
- Tangible impact: From reducing carbon emissions, minimising food waste, and eliminating single-use plastics to building sustainable partnerships and educating future generations, our outcomes speak for themselves.
- Pioneering leadership: In a sector where sustainability is often overlooked, LEYF stands out for integrating sustainable practices across governance, leadership operations, and pedagogy.
Read more
Our Sustainability Strategy sets out our approach and how we'll get there
Our commitment to sustainable development
- Economic prosperity: We reinvest our profits to enhance staff development, foster and share pedagogical research t enhance practice, and ensure the highest quality education and care for every child.
- Social equity: With 77% of our nurseries located in some of London’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, we champion equal access to Early Years Education and Care
- Environmental integrity: Our extensive sustainability efforts include ISO14001 accreditation, Planet Mark certification, Eco Champions in every nursery, and strategic partnerships with 12 partners: Bikeworks, City Harvest, Fashion Enter, Findel, Green Bottoms, Growing Revolution, Merihill Mushrooms, Planet Mark, Pura, Sal’s Shoes, Sproot Baby, and Wormcity.
Take action
Join the Community of Practice, where ECEC colleagues want to become sustainability-informed so that our young children will inherit a healthy planet.
Leading a greener future for children
We believe education for sustainability is a goal of Early Years Education and Care, and every teacher and educator must become sustainability-informed if we are to prepare children to become global citizens. Winning the King’s Award reflects our deep commitment to embedding sustainability in every aspect of our work and inspiring others in the sector to follow suit.
Together with our colleagues, families, partners, and communities, we are building a brighter, fairer, and greener future — one child at a time.
Nick Corlett, LEYF Sustainability ManagerSustainability isn’t an afterthought – it’s at the heart of everything we do and shapes our pedagogy and practice, fuels our values, and guides our daily decisions.
