Climate Assembly 2023

This year’s School Climate Assembly saw Fearnhill students travel north to the UK’s second city, Birmingham. 

A combination of Year 11 and 12 Geography students set off from Letchworth at a bright and early 7am on Thursday 19th October to travel up to King Edward’s School, Birmingham to help us in our continued battle against climate change.

This year’s focus was very much around the galvanising of the students to take action and protest to increase the volume of concern but also to demand for action on change and to hold leaders and politicians to account on the promises they have made to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (COP26).

The first speeches were given by Chris Packham, famous TV presenter, broadcaster and campaigner, and Scarlett Westbrook, she is the youngest regular policy writer in Parliamentary history. Her work gets climate concerns and management written into schools curriculums. Both gave impassioned speeches that fired up the 3000 students within the marquee.

The students then completed a workshop working with other schools to plan and design climate combating homes and settlements of the future.

Lunch was carbon zero food and we remained in the giant marquee for the second workshop investigating the insulation of homes within the UK and the current poverty crisis. This workshop was quite hard hitting and I am proud that some of our Fearnhill students made their voices heard during this workshop.

The final session of the day saw TV personality and Wildlife Photographer Hamza Yassin chairing a debate on various climate issues with students voting for which challenge they perceived as greatest.

We left the conference buzzing with lots of new ideas and ready to campaign to help reduce the impact of climate change by limiting the warming to 1.5°C and to ensure that we hold the politicians, TNCs and world leaders accountable.

It was a long journey but definitely worthwhile. Massive thanks to Miss Cheeseman for travelling up and keeping me company on the 4 hour round journey.   Mr Fowler