Tag: FCYP group

An opportunity to share your thoughts about climate change

Falkirk Council has a Climate Change team led by an officer called Mari-Claire Morgan. This team includes 5 people who work with all services across the Council to help everyone use energy efficiently. The team help us all study climate change in lots of ways, but this blog post explains how they connect pupils from schools with our local politicians – also known as “elected members”. From August 2022, we want to make sure that more pupils from Falkirk schools can join in with these meetings between the Climate Change team and our politicians. The meetings will be organised so that pupils can share their own climate change projects, plus any worries or questions they have. This is one of the ways in which Falkirk Council and Falkirk Children’s Services want to make sure that the voices and ideas of pupils are listened to and acted upon. The articles of the UNCRC say that all pupils in Falkirk Council area have the right to be heard and to contribute to decisions about their education.

These meetings have a long and fancy name – they are called ” Climate Change All Stakeholder Working Group meetings”. The first two will take place on September 7th and November 11th 2022 between 3-4pm. A member of staff in each school will help pupils to join the Microsoft Teams meeting because it needs to take place outside Glow. Please speak to your form teacher or a member of your school’s senior leadership team if you would like to be one of the pupils who joins these online meetings. We feel it is very important that children and young people in Falkirk have an opportunity to share their thoughts about climate change and hope you think that this new opportunity is valuable.

Falkirk Children and Young People – Come and join our group!

In October 2021 around 300 children and young people from Falkirk Council schools met online for the first time. They chose to join this meeting because they wanted to have a voice and share their opinions about their education. Some of them were part of pupil voice or eco-groups in their own school, and others volunteered to come along as individuals. Many of these pupils care deeply about climate change and other issues which affect their lives and their education – they want to work together to change these things. The big group split into the 5 smaller groups below to make it as easy as possible for each young person to be part of the groups which interested them most:

  • A Voice for all – this group makes sure that the ideas and opinions of our very youngest learners are listened to
  • Young Activists – this group share their opinions and ideas about important decisions which affect children and young people across Falkirk
  • Guardians of climate change – this group are passionate about our environment and our planet and want to take action on climate change
  • Children’s Rights Matter – this group are busy making sure that everyone across Falkirk know about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1987) and all of its articles (Click here to find our more about your rights)
  • Leading the team – this group makes decisions about how to organise our work across all of the channel groups

Next school year the group want to meet face to face, at least once in each school term and their first meeting will be on 26th August 2022. The meetings will all take place during school time. This new blog was created at the same time as the group to make it easier for the group to communicate with other children, young people, parents and staff across Falkirk Council. We are writing this blog post to see if there are other children and young people who would like to join the Falkirk Children and Young People’s group. Please click here to fill out our contact form if you would like to join.

You might want to know more about what the group have done this year – so far we have:

  1. Taken part in 4 whole group meetings and 1 other meeting in our channels
  2. Met our new Members of the Scottish Youth Parliament for Falkirk
  3. Learned how to take part in a meeting
  4. Created logos for some of our channel groups
  5. Used our Team to post messages to each other
  6. Planned what we want to do following the COP 26 event in Glasgow 2021

We’ll look forward to hearing from you.