Thornton Education Trust (TET) is an organisation, established in 2021 with one simple, yet powerful mission: to foster a vibrant community of practitioners dedicated to crafting a better-built environment by engaging children and young people in their surroundings.

This guiding principle fuels our multifaceted initiatives, which include the Inspire Future Generations (IFG) Awards, TET Dialogues, and a commitment to developing comprehensive policies that enable young people to nurture creativity and knowledge, empowering them to engage in the built environment.  

The ‘Inspire Future Generations’ Awards is central to our mission, celebrating built environment professionals, practitioners, and stakeholders across the public and private sectors. These awards hold a unique place in the UK's architectural and built environment landscape, aiming to recognize outstanding contributions that champion children and young people's engagement in advocating for an improved built environment, ensuring that the next generation shapes our shared spaces.

Alongside the IFG Awards, we have recently launched the ‘Architecture into Education’ Awards has also been launched to recognise, promote and celebrate teachers and built environment professionals who have been using themes of architecture and the built environment in the classroom. 

The awards programmes have provided us with the information to build up a unique resource bank of case studies which provide us and others with insight into the ways different organisations are engaging children and young people in the built environment, allowing us to reference use or adapt this information to better support and encourage organisations in our community of practice.

We also have TET Dialogues, a series of talks and conversations that engage stakeholders in the topic, alongside events and a collection of resources. The ENGAGE Symposium, scheduled for October 13, 2023, at the London School of Architecture, invites practitioners to tackle the intricate topic of "engagement" in the built environment, exploring its diverse forms, opportunities, and challenges. It aims to cultivate a holistic approach that ensures authenticity and inclusivity, leading to meaningful youth engagement in urban planning and design.

These activities serve our overarching objective of nurturing a community that not only values the perspectives of young people but also empowers and educates them to engage in their environments. As the next generation, giving children and young people the power to shape their surroundings can provide them not only with a range of transferrable skills but also gives them the confidence that they can make meaningful change to the places around them.

The applications for the upcomingIFG 2023 Awards are open until the 20th of October. If you are an organisation in the built environment sector that champions engaging children and young people in architecture and the built environment or an individual working hard in this field, there is still time to apply!

You can find out more about TET’s mission and current activities you can check out the website here. You can also sign up for the monthly newsletter which keeps you up to date with the latest updates and events connected to the built environment and engaging children and young people, as well as following us on Instagram and Twitter.