Children and young people are experiencing considerable climate anxiety and are starting their adult life with a sense of existential threat and a perception that it’s too late and there’s nothing to be done. We need to change that. It’s simply not true, but the current requirements of the national curriculum are focused on problems rather than solutions. Teachers want better information and different ways to teach it.
Hot Poets Co-director, Chris Redmond
In classrooms across the UK, young minds are forming. A sea of new thoughts are taking shape. Skills are being discovered and honed, futures imagined.
Schools are at the centre of how the next generation of thinkers and makers, debaters and creators find their place in the world. There is wonderful potential in places of learning to nurture hope and inspiration, rather than anxiety and despair.
We are immensely excited to be part of the new Ignite initiative led by Hot Poets, bringing climate action poetry to schools though a new nationwide education programme featuring poems from We Feed The UK and beyond.
Over one million students and teachers will have their minds opened to the full breadth of promising solutions to climate breakdown, including nature-friendly farming. Other ideas range from wind energy and whale poo to citizen science and cycling.
An anthology of new poems, written in collaboration between twenty Hot Poets and prestigeous knowledge holders on climate issues, alongside teaching resources developed in collaboration with Oxford University’s Climate Research Network and UCL’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education, will form the basis of a poetry-centred, cross-curricular schools offer. The offering includes ‘poets in school’ workshops, digital CPDs and video lessons led by Michael Rosen, and a range of supporting materials drawing on science and real world examples of world-shaping innovations and action.
Global heating is the single biggest threat facing mankind, yet climate education in this country is woefully inadequate. Children need to be equipped with knowledge and skills but they also need to be inspired, and to feel a sense of agency and excitement about the future they will shape. I would like to see positive examples of climate action woven throughout the curriculum and am proud to be an ambassador for Hot Poets Ignite which seeks to do exactly that.
Michael Rosen
Diz Undone (formerly Dizraeli) and Kate Fox have recrafted their brilliant We Feed The UK poems into childrens poems, for students in Key Stage 2 and lower Key Stage 3. Exploring the potential of seeds and soil to build climate resilience and revive lost biodiversity, the two newly launched poems, The Soil Speaks (children’s edition) and Hooting Hallelujas in the Dark, form part of the core schools offering.
Three of our original We Feed The UK poems – The Lig by Testament, Just One by Jasmine Gardosi , and Again Again by Bohdan Piasecki – exploring the roles of hedgerows, community, and compost in a regenerative future, complete the initiative’s further education resources.
We are so pleased that these important verses will find their catchy lines buzzing in many more brains over the coming months as our collaboration with the incredible Hot Poets continues to evolve and flourish.
The aim is to ignite a sense of wonder about our natural world and the urgent need to protect it, individually and collectively. This is an exercise in changing the story, from all that is wrong, to all that is still to play for. Who better to help re-write the story, than poets and storytellers?
Hot Poets Co-Director, Liv Torc
It is deeply heartening to watch Hot Poets Ignite receive such a fantastic reception, nationally and internationally, since its launch earlier this month. Catch up on the news in The Independent. We are extremely excited to watch the ripples of this work inspire children, teachers, and parents as we journey towards a more just and liveable planet for all life on our Earth.
