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On Friday evening ( 29 May, 7.00 pm The Actors Church Covent Garden) we had the pleasure of listening to this very special concert, bringing together the Choir of King's College London and the Princeton High School Orchestra in a celebration of international friendship, collaboration, and shared values. This project reflects a commitment to peace, sustainability, equality, and cultural exchange, uniting young musicians from the United Kingdom and the United States through the universal language of music.

How a simple act of practical solidarity is transforming the journey to school in The Gambia’s Central River Region North Policies have been written. Schools have been built. Yet for many children in The Gambia’s Central River Region North, access to education is still measured in kilometres, not opportunity. 

‘In a single hour vast tracts of shaded woodland became a jumble of torn trees and upturned soil, exposed to the glare of the summer sun. Such land-clearing events are rare, but forests exhibit remarkable resilience in the face of disaster. I’m told that the Chinese character for ‘catastrophe’ is the same as that which represents the word ‘opportunity’. And, the blowdown, while catastrophic, presented opportunities for many species.’ (Wall Kimmerer, 2003: 89). In the context of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (Stein, 2021) what kinds of education for hope might support children’s and young people’s critical engagement in local and global issues? In the spirit of exploring the possibilities of hope further, this short article focuses on the area of global citizenship and sustainabilityrelated education. It will briefly open by sharing commonalities across pedagogical approaches that take up the concept and act of hope more critically, and close by offering reflective questions for educators, with suggestions for further reading. Perhaps it is a kind of hope that is grounded in the present, in future reimagining(s), in ethical solidarity, and an acknowledgement of our deep entanglement with the living metabolism of planet earth 1 our singular home (UNESCO, 2021); a hope that engages with complex root causes and lived realities of multiple overlapping crises in critically reflexive and contextually relevant ways. As McCloskey notes, ‘Hope can fire our collective imagination and critical consciousness as a mainspring to activism and intervention in the world.’ (2025: 3). Commonalities across critical pedagogical approaches to hope include: Acknowledging the context of a ‘seamless single story of progress, development and human evolution’ (Andreotti, V.D.O., 2021b Relating to social and ecological justice and the wellbeing of people and planet Using participatory, action-orientated and inquiry-based learning processes Exploring diverse worldviews and perspectives Practising grounding in the present with opening up possibilities for change (relational, embodied, response-able 2 ) Experiencing ‘struggle’ in different forms (dialogical, selfreflexive, open-ended) Engaging individual and collective agency, action and activism Looking for lifelong and life-wide learning and unlearning. 1 See ‘Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness’, in Machado de Oliveira Andreotti. 2021a 2 See ‘Crossing Borders’ in 2 Depth Education “Depth Education and the Possibility of GCE Otherwise, 2021b. Source: Andreotti, V. 2021a & 2021b., Atif, A. (2025)., Bourn, D. 2021., Bryan. A. and Mochizuki,Y., 2024., Giroux, H.A. 2025., Meade, E. 2025. Whilst engaging in the concept and act of hope more critically reflect upon: What kinds of education for hope might you explore further and why? How might you provide generative spaces for engaging in diverse worldviews and perspectives? In what ways can you facilitate individual and collective agency? How might you support learners’ practice grounding in the present in order to relate differently? In what ways can you support learners in navigating complex root causes and lived realities of local and global issues? As Chief Ninawa Hini Kui affirms, ‘The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present.’ (Andreotti et al, 2023: 73. An invitation for further reading: Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future . d’Abreu, C., Belgeonne, C., Bourn, D. and Hatley, J. (2025) ‘Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future’. DERC Research Paper 24. London: UCL Institute of Education. Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2021a) ‘Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism’ , London: Penguin Random House. Development Education and Hope . McCloskey, S. (2025). (ed) ‘Development Education and Hope’. ‘Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review’ , Vol. 41, Autumn. Centre for Global Education, Belfast. Link to and download the full reference list here

This summed up to me about why I volunteer for the Hands Up Project. HUP is a charity trust which, through its network of volunteers, connects children around the world with young people in Palestine. By means of online interaction, drama and storytelling activities, it enables the use of creativity and selfexpression to promote mutual understanding, personal growth, and the development of English language skills. I joined HUP in 2020 during COVID. After going to Palestine in 2017, I wanted to get more involved in working with Palestinian children in schools. HUP gave me the opportunity to link up with schools in the West Bank and Gaza. Every week I’d tell them stories from all over the world, then we’d discuss it, play games and I’d get them to retell it. Sometimes we would work from their coursebook English for Palestine’ in mutual team teaching sessions with their teacher. The simple act of telling a story became much more than entertainment. It became connection, healing, and a bridge to the world beyond their immediate reality to help them improve their language skills, and to give them a platform to speak about their lives in a language that connects them to people everywhere. I loved it, every week, seeing their smiling faces on the screen and building long lasting friendships with their teachers. I even went to Gaza in 2023 and met some of the kids I’d only seen on Zoom. It was a beautiful experience and something I will never forget. As hostilities escalated, I lost contact with everyone. I thought about where the kids were and what had happened to them. As I watched schools being bombed, universities flattened, and people killed in their thousands, I thought about where the kids I’d met were and what was happening to them. I kept in contact with many of the teachers I knew and heard daily news of displacement, destruction, hunger and bombing. Recently, I’ve started to link up again with children in Gaza, and it feels wonderful to be back helping them learn after being denied an education for over two years. Connecting with children in Palestine is more than just words. When a child in Palestine confidently tells their story to someone on the other side of the world, bridges are built, empathy grows, and the world gains a fuller picture of childhood in contexts far from peace and privilege. My work with these children is rooted in the belief that education and voice are inseparable. Through storytelling and English language learning, I witness children not just learning new vocabulary, but reclaiming their narratives, believing in their potential, and finding human connection in a world they perceive has abandoned them. And more than anything, this work reminds us all that children — everywhere — deserve to learn, to speak, and to be heard. Links to HUP information, books and resources: The Hands Up Project BY SUSAN PIPER Susan Piper is currently an ESOL teacher in Oldham, Greater Manchester and has worked in education for over 30 years. She is also a volunteer for the Hands Up Project and is the International Solidarity Officer and President of her NEU district. She believes in quality education for all and aims to make her lessons creative and inclusive so that effective language learning can take place.

Small children play contentedly side by side. From time to time, a toy is snatched, a child is pushed, a whine of protest arises. The teacher’s voice is steady and encouraging: use your words, not your hands; wait your turn. There will be an emotional meltdown at some point, but soothing adult words settle it quickly. Upstairs a clutch of nine-year-olds hover over a maths problem. One girl insists she knows a quicker way that she learned on social media; her friend is adamant they must stick to the method they were taught. The teacher looks on approvingly. In a nearby room, a child dabs their eyes with a tissue while a teacher speaks softly and leans in close, offering reassurance. Meanwhile, in the hall, the older children are debating government spending on overseas aid. It’s getting heated. They speak their mind and defend their views passionately: what they have heard people say, what they have seen online. The teacher intervenes, pointing to the ground rules projected on the wall: think before you speak, your words can hurt others. A pause, and then the debate surges back to life. Schools are not, and have never been, conflict-free zones: they are shaped by the pressures and tensions that exist in their communities. Besides their schoolbag, children carry the weight of personal trauma, family conflict, poverty and a kaleidoscope of influences, good and bad, through the school gates each day. Teachers and other school staff are also inscribed in conflict, as they confront the challenges of poor wellbeing, inequality and harmful social attitudes, with increasingly constrained resources. Of course, school education itself is the subject of conflict. Access to free universal education for all children has rarely been simply granted; it has been struggled for over time, and for some children remains precarious or denied altogether. But the vignettes above reveal the powerful role education can play in a world bedeviled by conflict. Children in the Early Years Setting are learning life’s first lessons: to share resources, to respect others’ space and belongings, to negotiate and to regulate emotions. The older children might be frustrated by rules that do not suit themselves personally, and others may easily forget them in the heat of the moment, but there is a collective appreciation of why the rules exist, and an understanding that the world extends beyond our own thoughts and interests and that empathy, compassion and respect are key to personal realisation and to group harmony. None of this happens by accident. It is the result of consistent, structured, professional teaching, reinforced by a nurturing homelife. It depends on adults setting boundaries with children, modelling respect, building emotional literacy, helping children understand consequences of actions and stepping in when things go wrong. What looks effortless from the outside is the outcome of daily effort. It has so much more chance of success when it is well-resourced. In Scotland, we have a curriculum that aspires for children to be successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors, and responsible citizens. Despite its imperfections in implementation, it is a powerful declaration that education must be about more than academic attainment: it’s about nurturing and shaping the people who will have to confront challenges - personal, social, and global - which previous generations could barely have imagined. In the past year, the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) has collaborated with partners to develop tools for teachers to counter the effects on children of online hate. We have also supported a key project to tackle misogynistic attitudes and behaviours which are perpetuated among young people by online content and algorithms. Alongside the development of our Education for Peace policy, EIS members have engaged in the strengthening of Scotland’s Learning for Sustainability strategy to enhance the way our children relate to each other and to the natural world around them. All of this is important work in addressing conflict. However, we should never forget the criticality of the learning and teaching that goes on every day, and the importance of resourcing it properly in our nursery classes, our primary, secondary and special schools. In a world scarred by conflict, this is the quiet and healing work of hope. BY ANDY HARVEY National Officer, Educational Institute of Scotland

The aim of Holocaust education should never be to introduce young people to the details of the horrors of the Holocaust, but to help them to understand how it could happen: what led up to it, and to recognise how conspiracy theories, fake news and disinformation lead to prejudice. And how prejudice leads to racism – and when racism is allowed to flourish, then there is no limit to what can happen. I give talks mainly to students in Year 6 who are in the last class of primary school. They are good listeners and generally uninhibited about interacting and asking searching questions. Some talks inevitably have to be on Zoom because of unmanageable distances, but there is an advantage because several schools can participate and I have spoken to as many as 500 children in one session. With a bit of technical luck, I can see them and they can see me as well as PowerPoint illustrations. I talk about my own experiences as a child and how my cousin and I became the targets of racism and learned how antisemitism, surely the oldest form of racism, felt as well as what it meant. Our stories had very different outcomes: I was lucky and survived. I came to England with my parents. We discuss what refugees may bring with them and what and who they must leave behind and how that may feel. I encourage them to listen to others’ stories and to tell their own – we all have stories to tell and they help us to welcome strangers, not to fear them. My cousin was not lucky. He was one of six million who were not lucky. The children and I explore together what 6,000,000 means. We stand and I tell them that the late Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Jonathan Sachs, once worked out that if we stood for just one minute to commemorate each of the 6,000,000 we would be standing in this place for 11 years and 4 months. We talk about who can do such things? and I stress that there are no bad people but only people who do bad things. I give examples of kindness: a child who played with me when the other children and teachers in my school shunned me and called me names, a man in the Nazi party, who knew and saved my father when he was arrested, and a doctor who took me to hospital, where Jews were not allowed, when I nearly lost a finger. Eli Wiesel, an author, who witnessed the worst terrors of the Holocaust as a child in the camps, once said that when we tell our stories, we share the responsibility of being a witness and when enough of us become witnesses we may never let it happen again. BY HEDI ARGENT Hedi and her parents came to England as refugees from Austria in 1939. Hedi spent most of her working life in Social Work specialising in the adoption of older children and children with disabilities. She has written and edited more than twenty books on the subject and is still working and speaking in schools about the Holocaust and what it means to be a refugee. Hedi has recently written her own story and has donated the royalties from her book sales to the Foundation. She is also an ambassador for the Foundation.

On Monday 27 April 2026 we heard first-hand about the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women 2026, CSW70, with the theme “Ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls”. 

What does it mean to be a boy in today’s world? Is it to be watched, managed, expected to fail before you even begin, or is it to be shaped, trusted, and taught how to carry dignity without dropping it? That question followed me off the bus at the Dignity Defenders camp. The air was thick with uncertainty. Boys from different schools stood in long, uneven lines, gripping oversized bags under a sun that felt far too awake for how unsure we all were. One by one, police officers searched through our belongings at the gate. No introductions. No explanations. Just hands in bags, eyes scanning for what might go wrong. The message landed quietly but firmly: we were not trusted. At first, it stung. I looked around at the boys beside me, some nervous, some joking too loudly, some silent, and none of them looked like criminals or threats. They looked like boys carrying more than just clothes: expectations, pressure, unfinished childhoods. And yet, here we were, treated as potential problems before we were given the chance to be people. Still, honesty matters. An all-boys camp does sound like something that could collapse into chaos if left unchecked. In a world already strained by conflict and unrest, caution becomes a reflex. That gate, uncomfortable as it was, became the first lesson: when society loses trust, control rushes in to fill the gap. What followed, however, was not control, it was education in its most human form. We were separated from friends, gently but deliberately, nudged into unfamiliar conversations. We slept in shared dormitories; bunk beds stacked like unspoken agreements to coexist. Slowly, the tension softened. The space began to feel less like a holding area and more like a classroom without walls. One speaker, calm and sharply articulate, spoke about substance abuse. When he revealed that he was a former drug addict, the room shifted; not because of shock, but because of contrast. He did not look broken. He looked rebuilt. His story dismantled the idea that one mistake writes an entire future. It reminded us that education is not about erasing the past but understanding it well enough to move forward. Later, a boy raised his hand and admitted he used substances to cope with stress at home. There was a brief, fragile silence. Then someone asked, "Why?". That single question cracked something open. Suddenly, drugs were no longer the headline; pressure, pain, and survival were. Education, in that moment, did not judge. It listened. We learned how to defend dignity, physically, legally, and emotionally. We learned what to do when it is threatened, how to protect ourselves and others, and how to act instead of freeze. These were not academic lessons. They were tools for a world that does not always play fair. Near the end of the camp, chess appeared, almost casually, disguised as a fun competition. What began as a game slowly unfolded into a lesson. We were encouraged to play, to compete, to enjoy it, but also to think. Each move demanded patience. Every decision carried a consequence that could not be taken back. It was no longer just about winning, but about understanding that rushing the present often sabotages the future. When the competition ended, the strongest players were rewarded with mini chessboards. Receiving my first chessboard felt symbolic, a small object carrying a quiet reminder that life, like chess, rewards those who think beyond their next move. By the end of the camp, something had shifted. My idea of masculinity no longer revolved around strength or silence, but awareness. Education, I realised, is what teaches us how not to become what the world fears we already are. In times of unrest, education is not a luxury; it is a stabiliser; a compass. As Steve Sinnott called it, ‘the great liberator.’ And for a group of boys who were once searched at a gate, it became the reason we walked out trusted, not by authority, but by ourselves. BY JOENTY NGOMA CULTURAL HIGH SCHOOL SOUTH AFRICA (GRADE 11)