Hannah and Lucy are back on a Wednesday night, broadcasting from Portugal and the UK, with a guest whose organisation is reshaping how schools’ approach PSHE and citizenship. Anoushka joins from Superkind, the social action platform built around the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to talk about what happens when young people are given a genuine voice in their communities. Superkind grew out of a simple observation. Children who take social action become better critical thinkers, better empaths and more confident leaders, yet very few schools manage to embed this consistently. Too often it relies on one passionate teacher carrying the whole initiative, and for everyone else it falls by the wayside. Anoushka explains how Superkind was built from the ground up with teachers, for teachers, to make meaningful social action accessible to every school, whatever their capacity, and why she believes this matters as much for young people themselves as it does for the communities they serve. The conversation moves through real examples that show what this looks like in practice. At Sarre Square Primary School in Southwark, a group of Year Three pupils spoke up about rats and cockroaches in their council housing. They wrote letters shaped like the pests themselves and sent them to the council, and the resulting meeting, with parents invited too, led to pest control being brought in house. In Liverpool, pupils affected by knife crime organised a sponsored walk across five schools to raise funds for bleed kits. Anoushka is clear that it's stories like these, driven by pupils rather than handed down from above, that stick, and that give children a real sense of their own agency. Hannah, who helped build Superkind’s secondary resources over the summer, and Lucy dig into how schools choose which of the seventeen goals to tackle, whether by class, by year group or as a whole school, and why school councils alone often fail to represent the pupils who most need to be heard. They talk through gender equality and something as ordinary as school uniform choices, misinformation and a piece of UCL research linking book access at home to climate literacy, and the safeguarding conversations that inevitably come with letting pupils raise difficult topics in class. Hannah also shares a persuasive writing project that grew into free football kit for a local team, a small reminder of how quickly a well-taught skill can turn into something tangible for a family. There's a lighter side too. Playground mishearings, a Backstreet Boys wristband that refuses to come off, and Lucy's ongoing CrossFit injuries all make an appearance, alongside a genuinely useful breakdown of how Superkind’s six-session structure works, moving from the "what" and the "why" through to the "who", the relatable role models pupils are shown, and finally the "how" that gets them taking action and reflecting on it. Anoushka closes with a striking statistic. Pupils fundraising through their own Superkind pages raise up to ten times more than schools managed before, proof that when young people are trusted to lead, communities respond in kind, whether that's grandparents, parents or someone stopped in a supermarket queue. For anyone teaching PSHE, RSE or citizenship, working on school ethos and community cohesion, or simply looking for practical ways to build pupil voice into the curriculum, this episode is full of ideas that can be picked up and used the following morning. It's a good reminder, too, that pupils rarely see themselves as agents of change until somebody hands them the structure, the confidence and the permission to try. Find out more, or book a free demo, at superkind.org. New episodes of Hannah and Lucy land regularly, so follow the show to catch next week's conversation on teaching, learning and the realities of life in the classroom.
