"Incredibly exciting and inspiring": a volunteer experience of our parliamentary reception

Hi! We’re Cat and Enfys, A-Level students from Nottinghamshire and we both joined the campaign as volunteers this year. Last week we were incredibly lucky to attend Teach the Future and Let’s Go Zero Parliamentary Reception for the Decarbonising of Schools, sponsored by MP Nadia Whittome.

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What our day looked like

We got the train to London together, and took some photos of my dogs in the time we had while waiting! Once we were on the train, Cat quickly busied herself with French homework, with the agreement that I’d buy her something from Itsu if she finished her essay, whilst I was much less productive and spent the hour and a half journey watching a show.

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The reception itself was amazing. We started off gently, putting TTF postcards on the tables and signing people in at the registration table, handing out name and pronoun stickers. After that, we left to do some networking, and ended up in a conversation with a group of architecture students from the University of Bath, attending with Student’s Climate Action Network (StuCAN). Cat particularly found this interesting – she’d just finished applying for Architecture at various universities, including Bath, with the intention to involve sustainability heavily in her studies and career. Seeing older students doing that very thing was super inspiring for her - and was one example we saw that day of the fact that there are so many different ways to use your career path to be involved in positive change, even if they may not seem connected to environmentalism at first glance. After this, we settled in for a series of speeches from some truly inspiring people. Liv Marshall, a Political Coordinator at TTF started with a fantastic opening speech, before Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for East Nottinghamshire and sponsor of Teach The Future’s Climate Education Bill, did her speech. Phil Clarke, president of the National Education Union spoke next, followed by the amazing Jenny Kendall, an architecture student at Cambridge (Cat was particularly starstruck) and Earl Russell, the Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson for Energy and Climate Change. The highlight for me was Phil Clarke – I was particularly interested in his passion for outdoor education, which I believe could be an excellent way of incorporating the climate into education. Cat also felt connected to this, as a member of GirlGuiding, and frequent hiker and camper.

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After speeches, there was networking (and food!). Myself, Cat and Nico (a Campaign Organiser at TTF) spent some time talking to someone from OVO Foundation about the importance of integrating climate education across all subjects, not just science. We particularly discussed the A-Level Religious Studies curriculum – as a Religious Studies student who wishes to teach the subject in the future, this is incredibly important to me as there are so many opportunities to integrate environmental issues into the subject, particularly into the Ethics part of the specification. We also touched on the new Natural History GCSE, which we agreed may not be as effective as hoped. Many schools simply won’t have the resources to offer it, and it still doesn’t solve the problem of the integration of climate education across all subjects.

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Why the event was so important

• The school estate is the biggest emitter in the public sector.
• Each 0.5°C increase in temps reduces student learning by 1%.
• 10,000 pupils, teachers and school staff in the UK have died of lung cancer caused by asbestos exposure in school buildings in the last 40 years.

Retrofitting our school buildings isn't just an opportunity to decarbonise and ensure pupils are safe at school, it's an investment in our communities, in young people and educators' health and futures, and it's an opportunity to lead the way on action for the climate.

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Our highlights 

One of the best parts of the day was talking to other students. Many students there were from years 11-13, and had been invited with their school due to their involvement with their schools’ Eco Committees. Cat and I Iead our Sixth-Form’s Eco Group, and we’re currently tackling the recycling issues at our school. We quickly found that all of the students we spoke to have similar stories of struggles with sustainability at their school. These conversations felt incredibly valuable to both of us – it demonstrated that these issues are systemic, not just isolated to our school, and it really solidified to us how crucial the work that we’re doing is.

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All in all, the day was positive, hopeful and so incredibly exciting and inspiring, (albeit a bit exhausting, but in the best way possible). We left parliament feeling more motivated than ever to continue our work with Teach the Future, pushing for climate education and the decarbonisation of schools, as well as feeling that our voices were being truly heard and valued.

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