Empowering young people in the built environment
The saying “young people are the future” is especially relevant to how and where we live, work and play. Young people inherit the world we’ve made. But they have no say today in designing or planning it.
Yet our ‘built environment’ – villages, towns, cities - generates 40% of carbon emissions and embodies so many issues that govern quality of life, particularly our health and wellbeing and that of the planet.
Young people want to understand how we make and manage what we build to tackle the challenges they will face. We campaign for young people to be engaged from an early age. We help them have a voice through participation. To understand and develop skills that can lead them to creative, technical, entrepreneurial, or civic roles.
We do this through education programmes and awards schemes that explain and demonstrate how to involve and engage young people, in schools, through dialogue, working with professionals within projects.
We help you with guidance and toolkits, as educationalists, professionals, promoters of policies and projects, to develop the capacity to do this well.
Our Awards - showcasing excellence in engagement and participation
Inspire Future Generations Awards launched in 2021. celebrate the value of engagement with and participation by young people and children in built environment projects or programmes annually.
The winners are showcased online providing a valuable resource of excellence to inspire future projects for all individuals or organisations, developers, built environment professionals, who want to engage with young people and children.
This Must Be the Place, Cement Fields, Ebbsfleet, Kent was the winner of our Community Engagement Category in the Inspire Future Generation Awards 2023. It is a pioneering programme of research, artists’ residencies and co-commissions created in collaboration with organiser Cement Fields and the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation. Local young people are co-leading a programme exploring the shaping of Ebbsfleet as it is built with partners including architects, designers, policy makers.
Making the future better for tomorrow’s citizens
Creative Thinking Awards is the new title we’ve given to our Architecture into Education Awards. These were launched in 2023 and are held every two years with the next due in 2025. They are aimed at teachers and built environment professionals who deliver excellence in projects engaging children and young people in schools or higher education. To see our 2023 winners. How to support our awards
Our Knowledge Hub – a community of practice
We share and use our knowledge and expertise gleaned from yours and our own experience of engagement and participation in three main ways:
NEW - The Engage Toolkit
We’ve built a new toolkit to help our community understand best practice in engaging young people and children and ensuring their participation helps generate a wider social value. Find out more
TET Dialogues – sharing lessons learnt
Our regular TET Dialogues series of presentation/discussion events involving built environment professionals, local authorities, developers, agencies and others, interrogate a wide variety of individual projects to transmit and discuss lessons learned. Find out more
Research and publications
We initiate and publish new research into education, public policy and practice that progresses children and youth engagement and participation in built environment. You can read and download our research with partners and sign up to our regular TET Newsletter.
New partnerships and ways of collaborating are how we improve what can be achieved for young people. If you want to support TET, discuss an idea, or find out more, please get in touch.
The Ursuline Academy Ilford was a winner in our Architecture into Education Awards 2023 with a future project for a zero-carbon community on a site in London’s Royal Docks. The approach to its design focused on the application of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths).
Five students formed Team Project Prasinos and created a concept for a practical building solution generating renewable energy from transparent photovoltaic glass, with help from glass manufacturer Saint Gobain and PV panel developer Polysolar.
