National Education Nature Park top-up grant

The grant is being funded by the Department for Education and administered by the RHS.

There are currently no plans for a Nature Park grant after 2024/25.

The application form opens on Thursday 12 September 2024 and closes at 5pm on Thursday 28 November 2024. The grant has to be spent and invoices and receipts collected by you by Monday 17 March 2025 and your expenditure reports submitted in the grant portal by Tuesday 22 April 2025.

The grant is non-competitive. You only need to fill in the application form correctly to receive the grant. If your setting received a Nature Park grant in academic year 2023/24, the 2024/25 top-up grant is for up to £2,000. The deadline to apply is 5pm on Thursday 28 November 2024. The grant must be spent by Monday 17 March 2025.

The grant can only be used for capital spend. The grant is primarily to increase biodiversity in your grounds as part of your engagement with the Nature Park programme, including purchasing equipment and fieldwork items that enable outdoor learning and pupil engagement. These case studies might be useful for giving you ideas on what you can do.

We recommend you use the optional checklist resource to help plan the timescales of your project.

You should start your project as early as possible. This depends on how big a project it is, e.g. are you going to dig up some tarmac and need to hire contractors for this? You should also consider:

• How long it will take to involve young people in planning your project
• How long will it take to get quotes from suppliers
• How long will it take to add suppliers to your payment system
• Does your school or Trust pause purchases and payments at certain times e.g. at the end of the financial year
• What risk assessments do you need to carry out
• What permissions do you need to secure to have work done on your site
• Who is the stakeholder who can sign the grant agreement and long will it take for them to sign it
• It will take between two and six weeks to receive your grant payment
• If you are going to carry out disruptive works on your site and whether there is a school holiday that will enable you to do this
• The expenditure deadline is Monday 17 March 2025. You must have all your receipts and invoices showing you have spent the grant by this date

The National Education Nature Park and associated grant provides the opportunity for children and young people to develop a meaningful connection to nature and an understanding of our role to act on the biodiversity and climate crises. Plan to get the maximum benefit out of your grant by involving your young people in the Nature Park five step process.

The habitat improvements made possible by the grant should therefore involve children and young people in making the decisions about how your education setting will spend your grant. The Nature Park has activity resources which will ensure young people are at the centre of decision making and feel empowered to take action to improve and care for nature on their education site.

The grant will be paid in advance, so you will need to know how much you will spend before you fill in the application. When we have approved your application for funding and you accept your grant agreement, you are welcome to start buying the items you have included in your application. Please consider timings needed and approval levels for signing the grant agreement into your project planning. You do not have to wait for the grant payment to arrive.

This is a non-competitive grant so our decision will not be affected by the amount you request as long as it is for no more than £2,000. You should only portal request the exact amount you know you will spend on an impactful project by Monday 17 March 2025.

As general guidance, your grant must be spent on a project that:

• Transforms a grey space to a green space, or that
• Does further work on the grey to green project we funded last year
• Builds or improves a pond, or that
• Creates or improves a grassland

Please carefully read the guidance on grey to green to make sure you understand this requirement.

The case studies might be useful for giving you ideas of what you can do.

You can spend up to £2,000 or your full grant on improving biodiversity on your site: plants including shrubs and trees, seeds, plant containers, planting material such as compost or topsoil, gravel, ponds, rain gardens, water holders and irrigation equipment. You can spend part of your grant on other equipment, but you must spend at least part of the grant on biodiversity enhancements.

There are limits on other types of expenditure:

You can spend up to 50% in total on gardening tools, equipment storage, wet weather gear and gloves, or fieldwork resources e.g. tablets to map your site and measure and record biodiversity, humidity meters, light meters, camera traps and stationery. This portion of the grant can also fund protective covers and insurance for devices.

You can use up to 50% of the grant amount on specialist support such as contractors or biodiversity experts. For example, you might pay a biodiversity expert to assess your site using the grey to green guidance and tell you what habitat enhancements will be most effective in improving a grey area of your school grounds. Alternatively, you might pay a contractor to dig up a paved area and plant trees. The specialist must contribute directly to your capital project. The grant can’t be used to pay for workshops or training.

See Is this item eligible for grant expenditure? for more guidance.

You can use your grant to do further work on the grey to green project we funded last year. Last year’s guidance is below in case it is useful, but you can use the grant to improve your formerly grey areas that are now green. You can also use it to create new green space.

Grey to green means creating new areas of natural habitat in a space at your school that currently has very low value biodiversity. The aim is to create new greener areas that support a much greater diversity of life. This means you make your habitat enhancements on:

• Ground currently covered e.g. paving, concrete, gravel or rubble or
• Bare, compacted earth, or
• Fences/walls*, or
• Roofs.

A space where weeds are growing is NOT grey space – these plants are likely to be a biodiverse habitat. To identify your grey spaces, we recommend doing this Nature Park activity with your young people.

You can use your grant to plant up or install a pond on top of these grey spaces, or you can use it to remove covered grey space and add your interventions to the resulting bare earth. Remember that planting in the ground is much more sustainable for the long-term. See the grey to green guidance for further details.

*If you are planting a green fence or wall, you can plant in the ground at the base of the fence or wall. Green walls can dry out quickly, so if you are planning on installing a green wall you will need to think about how it will be watered including over school holidays.

The grey to green enhancements can be adding ponds, grasslands and wildflowers, flower, fruit and vegetable planters, trees, green walls or roofs and water butts or other irrigation.

In 2024/25 we are encouraging schools to create or improve enhanced grasslands. This means:

• Short grass with reduced mowing (e.g. fortnightly) and no use of fertiliser/weedkiller/mosskiller. This type of grassland can make excellent mining bee nest habitat and support pollinators
• Wildflowers often called “weeds” are allowed to flower to support pollinators
• Long grass that is allowed to grow. This is better at flood mitigation, cooling, pollution capture, resisting drought and supporting larval stage insects, mammals and amphibians

You can improve a grassland by adding grassland seed mixes or plug plants of grassland plants and spring-flowering bulbs.
 
You should not use the grant to plant trees on existing green space, as this is not eligible expenditure. You can use the grant to add a pond to a grassland or other green space. If you do this, it is recommended to include a wilder area of long grass around the pond to provide some cover for the animals that want to access it.
 
See how to add flower-rich grassland for more guidance.

Yes, you can top up or extend other sources of funding with this grant to spend on your project. In the application form, we will ask what other funding you have. This is for project evaluation purposes and won't affect the amount we give you.

We recommend you use the optional checklist resource to help you with your project.

If you want to do this, you do not need to resubmit your application. You will report this to us in the expenditure reporting we will send you (see FAQ below for details). You can move expenditure around within the eligible items as long as it stays within the amount limits for each expenditure type.

When you accept your grant agreement, the payment will take two to six weeks to arrive. We ask you to bear with us in the meantime. We will email you an expected payment date usually one week before sending the funds.

The grant must be spent, and all receipts and invoices collected by Monday 17 March 2025, though the project can continue after this date. For example, you might buy all your seeds in March but plant in June.

If you know that you won’t be able to spend all your grant by this date, contact [email protected] and we will send instructions for returning the unspent portion.

 The grant has to be spent and your receipts and invoices collected by you by Monday 17 March 2025. Your expenditure can’t go into the new financial year on 1 April.

Planting and growing activities can continue after this date, and plant suppliers are often able to deliver plants at the appropriate growing time even if this is some months after payment. Please check with your financial officer if you have earlier deadlines for your end of financial year processes.

The deadline for your expenditure report is Tuesday 22 April 2025. See the FAQ below on reporting.

10% of grantees will be sent an audit report to fill in. If you receive this, you will need to upload all receipts and invoices. If you do not receive this, you only need to fill in the Annex G(ii) report in the grant portal which does not require any evidence. In either case, you must keep all invoices and receipts until September 2031 according to the grant agreement.

No. Your expenditure can’t go into the new financial year on Tuesday 1 April 2025.

Your expenditure schedule should be guided by the optimum planting times for the biodiversity improvements you want to make – see below for the timeline. We suggest you apply early so you can make your biodiversity enhancements before the optimum time window has passed, e.g. November to March for tree planting and March for grassland and wildflowers. If you are carrying on after the spring term with your project, you have the option of placing orders by March for later delivery.

The only green space you can use the grant for is an already existing pond or already existing grassland. The grant can’t be used to improve already existing fruit, vegetable, flower, tree or shrub areas. The grant also can’t be used to improve already existing forest school resources, sheds or other structures with the exception of adding green roofs or vertical planting.

The grant agreement requires you to keep all receipts for seven years. We will carry out expenditure audits of some settings, and all grantees must report on how their grant was spent using the Department for Education’s Annex Gii form. We will contact grantees with instructions.

It is a requirement of the Department for Education to report on your expenditure. We will ask you to report your expenditure using an online reporting form that we will send you in April 2025. In preparation, you should keep track of what you are buying in each of the grant categories. If your expenditure is audited, you will also be asked to match your expenditure to your receipts/invoices.

You may want to use the example spreadsheet provided at the end of the checklist resource.

As part of your biodiversity project, you can spend part of your grant on making your new green space more accessible, but not for outdoor learning resources not connected to your funded project. For example, putting down surfaces that are suitable for wheelchairs is acceptable. The types of items that are eligible will be decided on a case-by-case basis, so please email us to check. The grant can’t be used for outdoor SEND activities generally, but only for adding and enabling the measuring of biodiversity improvements.

See Is this item eligible for grant expenditure? for more guidance.

If we have contacted your setting direct, and/or if you received the Nature Park grant in 2023/24, you are eligible for the grant. The eligible educational settings have been chosen by the Department for Education. See the Nature Park funding allocation page to find out how the list of eligible schools and how eligibility was determined. If your setting is not on this list, visit our finding funding page for other biodiversity and outdoor education funding options.

You must have done the map your site activity before applying for your grant. If this hasn’t been done, it will delay your application assessment and could result in your application being rejected.

See Nature Park funding allocations page for the list of eligible schools and how eligibility was determined.

If you are a governor or a parent at an eligible school, please share information about the grants with a member of school staff. School staff should check with relevant stakeholders to agree who should fill in the application form on behalf of the school. The RHS will email eligible schools beginning in September 2024 with information about the grants programme. Because children should be involved in the project, we ask that applications aren’t made by e.g. MAT officers. Please see the FAQ for Multi Academy Trust applicants.

Let us know who the lead contact for your school will be by emailing [email protected]. We will email the link to the application form to this person.

The application is done online using our grant portal. The lead applicant will need to register at the portal, and if they have given us their contact they will be emailed a link to the application form. The form should take around 40 minutes on average to fill in. You do not have to fill it all in in one go, you can save any initial progress and return to your account to complete the application. You will need a bank statement for the account the grant will be paid into. The statement must be from the last three months.

The application will close at 5pm on Thursday 28 November 2024.

Note: settings that are exclusively early years/nurseries should do the habitat heroes activity.

For other settings, the mapping your site activity enables you and your learners to explore and map the habitats you currently have on site, helping you to decide where You can make the biggest positive difference for nature/biodiversity. Creating this first map of your site will enable you to measure and track the gains you achieve for nature. You and your students will be directly collaborating with the Natural History Museum on groundbreaking research into nature recovery, helping to inform education settings across the country and the world.

The habitat map must be completed by Tuesday 22 April 2025. This is a requirement of your Nature Park grant. Please note: this is a different activity from your site boundary, and involves filling in the habitats within your boundary using the Field Maps app.

If you have done the mapping your habitat activity in the Field Maps app, you can upload a screenshot to question 2 of  your application form. The activity starts with the boundary activity which you already did before we awarded the year 1 grant.

Here are the links to the guides and tools for the various stages of the habitat mapping process:

• prepare for mapping your site;
• ​the mapping your habitat activity using the Field Maps app;
• troubleshooting guide for the Field Maps app;
• editing your habitat map using the Habitat Map Editor tool;
• updating biodiversity changes on your site using the Mapping Change tool.

You will need to upload a bank statement to your application form. This must be no more than three months old and must be from a relevant business bank account e.g. for the school, local authority etc. The statement must show the account name, account number, sort code and date. We can pay the grant into Local Authority or MAT accounts if the setting doesn’t have its own account.

No. We will only award up to £2,000. You should take VAT into account when putting together your budget and process VAT in your usual way. If you cannot reclaim VAT on an item, the VAT cost can be met from grant funding. If you can reclaim VAT, then grant funding should not be used to cover the VAT portion and you shouldn’t include it in your expenditure reports.

We prefer for applications to come direct from the schools themselves. The purpose of the National Education Nature Park programme is for all young people to develop a meaningful connection to nature and lead the way in transforming their own school grounds for nature and people. Therefore, grant applications need to be completed by each individual eligible school to ensure that children and young people are involved in the process and that the interventions chosen are tailored to meet the specific needs of each education setting.

The lead applicant and anyone who will edit or sign off the application form will need to register on the Flexigrant website. Your registration and login details for Flexigrant are separate from your login for the Nature Park.

If you haven’t yet been sent the application form link, contact [email protected] after you have registered and ask for the link.

You will apply using our grant portal in Flexigrant. The lead applicant should create a profile. Please note, you will have to register separately on both Flexigrant and on the Nature Park website itself.

After you have registered on Flexigrant, you will be able to access the link to the application form. You can find the link at the top of the email sent to you in September 2024. To be sent the link again, contact [email protected]

You don’t have to complete the grant application all at once, but can save your progress and return to continue filling it in.

If all sections are marked Complete, and your participants have also completed but you can't see the Submit Application button, refresh the page.

To check if your participants have completed the form, select the Participants tab on the Summary page.

Your filled in application can be seen by going to the Application Portal and selecting View.

When you have opened your application, you can use the button at the top of the web page to print your application as a PDF. The budget table is also included in the grant agreement letter attached to your grant offer email.

We recommend you use the optional checklist resource to help you with your project. Let us know who the lead contact for your school will be by emailing [email protected].

We will contact this person in autumn 2024 with a link to the application form. In the meantime:

• The lead application should register on the Flexigrant portal
• Plan to get the maximum benefit out of your grant by involving your young people in the Nature Park five step process
• Explore what other schools have done to gain inspiration for your project
• Map your site with your learners to understand your starting point. Or if you are an Early Years setting take part in habitat heroes to understand your starting point.
• Share information about the grant with relevant members of staff. Any member of staff can apply for this grant, but we expect that you consult with your stakeholders and include children and young people in the process
• Browse and sign up to our range of webinars, which explore key elements of the nature park programme

If for any reason your school isn’t able to take part in the grants programme, please let us know.

At the end of each financial year you have planned expenditure, we will send you at least one form to report your grant expenditure to the funder, the Department for Education. You should keep track of what you spend the grant on in each of the expenditure categories in preparation for the reporting. The deadline to complete is midday on Tuesday 22 April 2025. You may want to use the example spreadsheet provided at the end of the checklist resource.

Some schools will be asked to send a more detailed expenditure report providing their receipts and invoices. You should keep all the receipts and invoices for your grant expenditure. The deadline to complete is midday on Tuesday 22 April 2025.

All settings will also be sent a post-grant survey. This is not an expenditure survey but will cover your experience as a grantee and your project outcomes.

Reports will be made available in the Flexigrant portal in March 2025. Go to the Application portal, select the Reporting button, find the form in the table, select the three little dots on the right side and select Complete Form.