#BigVoices School Spotlight - St Mungo's High School

A group of young people from St Mungo’s High School in Falkirk are working together to create bespoke solutions to real-world climate issues through the game-changing Challenge for Education programme.

St Mungo’s are one of five fore-runner schools across Scotland participating in the Challenge for Education programme, an SCQF 6-level qualification that challenges the students to come up with solutions to real-world issues that are set by industry giants AECOM, SSE, VisitScotland, Forth Ports, BAM Nuttall and IGS.

They are supported on their programme by previous Challenge participant Joseph Din, who now works as a graduate for AECOM who shared how he benefited from taking part.

“Through participating in the Fuel Change Challenge, I have learned how sustainable concepts and processes can be integrated within my own industry. It has also helped me to appreciate the importance of promoting sustainable initiatives as we approach the Net-Zero target dates, and I aim to use the new skills and ideas I have gained in this programme as I progress through my career. I believe this is an important and highly rewarding programme and I am excited to continue to work with Fuel Change to help promote these concepts to others.”

Fuel Change has created the Challenge for Education programme as an off-the-shelf resource for teachers. With all the climate education learning materials provided by Fuel Change, teaching staff don’t need to be subject matter ‘experts’, but can instead focus on facilitating the discussions between students, taking away the pressure often associated with taking on new courses.

Faculty Head of Humanities at St Mungos, Michelle McMullan, believes the programme has been invaluable for helping the young people to build self-confidence:

"Working with Fuel Change has brought a new and exciting opportunity to a group of our young people this year. The Challenge programme is allowing them to consider real life sustainability problems that industry faces and build their interpersonal and team working skills whilst working on solutions. Having Joseph as part of our classes has been fantastic. As an industry insider, and someone who has been through the programme himself, he is able to give our young people insight that we, as class teachers, cannot always provide. The programme is also encouraging our young people to develop their own leadership but also initiative and it has been excellent to see the way that they are engaging with the programme and materials. We are excited to see what the future holds."