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As 2021 comes to an end and Teach the Future enters its third year, it seems fitting to re-introduce ourselves to everyone new. Despite the pandemic, we’ve had a busy (but COVID-safe) year, and you can check out what we’ve been up to over the last few months in our recent blog: Overview of the Last Few Months at Teach the Future.
So, how did we start?
In 2019, Joe Brindle set up Teach the Future as a daughter campaign of SOS-UK with a few other dedicated campaigners. Their goal was to get Climate Education woven like a golden thread through the UK education system, and the way they planned to do it has remained largely unchanged:
We like to talk about how Teach the Future is student-led but it’s not always clear what that means. Essentially, it means our young volunteers make all decisions; they execute all our plans. All our volunteers are between 13 and 26 years old and in education or a gap year. We also have a decision-making procedure to ensure our decision-making is fair but time-sensitive and that we consult all the relevant people.
While we do have four members of core adult staff, they don’t make any decisions for the campaign and primarily make sure volunteers keep up with the work we have to do, manage any conflicts, and do any tasks we need an adult for!
What do we do?
Since Teach the Future started, we’ve done a lot! We began by holding a Parliamentary reception with Nadia Whittome for our English Climate Emergency Education Act, which has now had its first reading in Parliament. We’ve also attended and organised many campaign actions, including a huge protest with Youth Strike 4 Climate in early 2020, a protest at the Department for Education, and dozens of banner drops up and down the country. Nation-specific branches have been launched to ensure our campaign is as effective as possible, targeting the right people and policies in the right places. Following this, we diversified our Climate Education Bill (proposed law) into three separate pieces of legislation, one for each nation. And after government claims that Climate Education is satisfactory to most students and teachers, we ran our own research proving them wrong!
That’s a lot of projects for our volunteers to take part in, and there’s even more behind the scenes. Stereotypically, activists can be outspoken and very socially brave. Our volunteers who enjoy these activities speak at events like Reading Festival, Latitude Festival and climate events. As we know, most people don't fit into a stereotype, so there for those who prefer more structured work, we love to get on news platforms like the BBC and podcasts! And for anyone wanting to work in the background, there are always graphics, blogs, and videos for social media or banners and placards for public actions to make.
Before big institutions can make commitments to Teach the Future, there’s plenty of planning to be done and lots of opportunities to speak with high-stakes people, like the Secretary of Education and exam-board officials. As a climate campaign, Teach the Future gives volunteers access to other important events like COP26 and the Peers for Planet series in the House of Lords. Our volunteers attend these events and even speak to international audiences and personally meet renowned figures like Sir David Attenborough!
Onboarding
Hopefully, this gives you all a good idea of what Teach the Future is about and what it’s like to be a volunteer. In late January or early February, we’ll hold onboarding sessions for anyone interested in joining us. If this sounds like you, go to our website’s ‘Take Action’ page and click ‘Volunteer’ to sign up! We can’t wait to see you!