Empowering the Next Generation of Sustainability Leaders

by George Edwards, SEEd Programmes and Communications Officer

At SEEd, we believe that education is the most powerful tool for sustainability. However, for many young people, learning about the climate crisis can often lead to a sense of overwhelming anxiety. Our mission with the SEEd Young Changemakers (YCM) programme is to flip that narrative and move students from a state of doom-and-gloom toward hope, agency, action and real-world impact.

George Edwards

The SEEds of the YCM programme were sown over a decade ago. Inspired by the Young Enterprise programme, SEEd CEO Ann Finlayson envisioned a similar framework tailored towards sustainability. The real catalyst soon came from adults participating in our SEEd Changemakers course who insisted that young people needed the same skills they were building to navigate an uncertain future.

We launched our first single-school pilot in 2018 with a group of 17-year-old students. Development continued even through a year of COVID-19, where the programme was moved online. Since then, the programme evolved into a local area cluster pilot (Year 1) in Gloucestershire, to explore the impact of connecting young people with local community groups working in the field of sustainability. Halfway through this year, the cohort was joined by Yangrima School in Nepal, taking the YCM programme and its impacts international.

It was this year that we partnered with Dr Paul Vare at the University of Gloucestershire to undertake deeper academic evaluation into the programme, enabling us to further develop the theories and pedagogies behind the course to provide deeper, more transformative impacts.

Year 2 saw us bring YCM to more schools across the country, from Bristol to Cambridge and beyond. This year (2024-25), we tested a more hands-off approach, empowering these 10 schools to lead the programme independently. The evaluations in our SEEd Young Changemakers Evaluation Report 2024-25 reflect the successes, and drawbacks, of this approach, the results and recommendations from which have now been integrated into our current Year 3 programme.

What sets YCM apart is its rigorous theoretical foundation. We have partnered with Dr Paul Vare to conduct an ongoing independent evaluation of the programme. The research focuses on “Action Competence”, a framework that measures an individual’s combination of knowledge, skills, sense of agency and willingness to collaborate for change.

Instead of just teaching about sustainability, YCM uses action learning. We track students’ progress through pre- and post-project self-assessments and reflexive (not just reflective) logs, ensuring our methods are continuously refined based on academic evidence.

Each academic year, the SEEd Team works hard behind the scenes to gather feedback from teacher and student participants and, combining this with evaluation and recommendations from Dr Vare, refine the programme in our own action learning project.

The 2024-25 evaluation report highlights several powerful shifts in student development:

The report also reveals that YCM is not just for the students. Teachers reported a “personal transformation”, with many feeling “fired up” and more passionate about bringing sustainability into their everyday teaching across subjects, from Chemistry to PSHE.

However, the road isn’t without its hurdles. We learned that schools often struggle with time constraints and the pressure of exams. To support our busy educators, we are continuing to refine the resources to ensure a strong impact while working within the constraints of the overwhelming teacher workload.

If you are a teacher or school interested in bringing Young Changemakers or our Educator Changemakers CPD programme(s) to your school, please contact us at admin@se-ed.org.uk.

George Edwards & The SEEd Team