The International Student Competition is open to all students worldwide, aged 7-18 across two age categories – 7-11 years and 12-18 years.

The TSL 2026 International Student Competition will launch in September 2025, with submissions accepted from 1st October 2025. All entries must be submitted by 23.59 GMT on 1st March 2026.

To submit an entry you will need to login on our TSL International Student Competition Submittable Page (you will need to set up a Submittable account if you do not have one already). You will then be prompted to enter the entry details and upload your submissions.

Teacher Champions plays a valuable role in the competition and are the people who coordinate and submit competition entries on behalf of each school, college, education institution, home-school, or individual student.

If your teacher or school doesn’t wish to participate, a parent or guardian can register as your Teacher Champion and submit your entry. Further details are available on our How To Enter page.

For the 2025 Competition, please visit our Entry Resources page for articles, videos, and classroom tools about eco-anxiety and taking action. Entry resources for the 2026 Competition will be published soon.

An international panel of sustainability experts and educationalists will select the winning entries in each category.

Judging is based on:

• Understanding of the topic
• Originality, creativity and innovation
• Inspirational power
• Communication and presentation

ALL WORK SHOULD BE ORIGINAL & THE STUDENT’S OWN. A bibliography of references should be included where appropriate and will not be counted as part of the official word limit. Entries with plagiarised content will not be considered for an award.

Judges consider age when marking. Each student’s age is taken into account so that younger students are not at an unfair disadvantage when compared with older students.

For judging purposes, entries should be in English (primarily at least!) but given that English is a second language for many students, we do not expect entries to be in perfect English. Entries in non-native English are warmly welcomed.

Students can use AI as a functional support tool but it is important that they do not use AI tools to generate an entry and submit it as if it was their own work. All use of generative AI must be ACKNOWLEDGED in the bibliography – the minimum requirements to include are:

• Name and version of the generative AI system used; e.g. ChatGPT-3.5
• Publisher (company that made the AI system); e.g. OpenAI
• URL of the AI system.
• Brief description (single sentence) of context in which the tool was used.
• All prompts used to generate a response in the AI system.

For example: I acknowledge the use of ChatGPT 3.5 (Open AI, https://chat.openai.com) to help research the topic.

The top entry Finalists and Honourable Mentions will be announced on our website on 1st May 2026. The judges will then review the top shortlisted Finalist entries to select the Grand Prize Winner, Runner Up & Top Ten Medallists.  The Grand Prize Winner and Runner Up will be notified confidentially via email in late May 2026 and will be officially announced at the Student Debates in early July, 2026 (dates TBC).

Certificates are awarded to the Grand Prize Winner, Runner Up and all students receiving recognition as a Finalist or Honourable Mention.  Participating Teacher Champions are also awarded a certificate in recognition of their work in inspiring and encouraging student engagement in sustainability education.

Certificates for this year’s Finalists and Honourable Mentions will be available to download from the TSL certificates portal in late May 2026.

Certificates are uploaded to our TSL Certificate Portal and can be accessed and downloaded by Teacher Champions, using the login details which they provided when registering for the Competition.

Certificates will be awarded to students recognised as Finalists or Honourable Mentions. The top two Finalists in each age category will then be invited to represent their country at the Student Debates – the invitations for this will be sent in late May 2026.

For all events since 2017, our certificates have been created online and are available to download from the TSL Certificate Portal using your registered Teacher Champions login details (https://certificates.trustforsustainableliving.org/index.php). If you have mislaid your certificate please (in the first instance) go to your Teacher Champion for a copy.

The 2026 Debates will take place in early July 2026 (the dates are still TBC).

Invitations for the debates will be emailed to Teacher Champions in late May 2026