Young climate leaders: what happens when pupils run the meeting

Every Climate Champions School Club has a teacher patron. But the meeting belongs to the pupils.

Each club elects a student executive: a president, vice president, secretary, organiser, treasurer, an inclusion lead and a media lead. Selection encourages gender balance, and the roles are real ones with real work attached.

The jobs are genuine

• The secretary keeps the club register and the activity logbook
• The organiser plans the monthly practical action day
• The inclusion lead checks that younger pupils, girls and children with disabilities are taking part, not just attending
• The media lead prepares what the club will present at assembly or at a community event
• The president chairs the meeting and reports on what was promised last time

Teachers describe the shift plainly: pupils who arrive quiet in Term 1 are standing in front of the school by Term 3.

From the club to the community

Leadership practice is deliberately outward-facing. Club members write and perform short climate dramas, run debates, compose songs in local languages, prepare household climate pledges and speak at school assemblies and community durbars.

Adults will listen to a child explaining why the drain must stay clear long after they have stopped listening to a poster about it.

Skills that outlast the club

Public speaking, chairing a meeting, keeping honest records, persuading a room, including people who are usually left out — these are not climate skills. They are civic skills, learned through a climate project.

That is the point. CCSCI is not only trying to protect trees. It is trying to produce the kind of young person who notices a problem in their community and organises other people to do something about it.