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

This year’s International Student Competition launched in September 2024 with submissions accepted from 4th October 2024. All entries must be submitted by 23.59 GMT on 3rd March 2025.

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.

You can participate as an individual student, but if you are under 18, you will need to be registered and have your entry submitted by an adult. If your school/college or teacher do not wish to register, then a parent or guardian can register as a Teacher Champion and submit your entry, by following the same registration process detailed on the website for Teacher Champions.

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

Our judges will be scoring on the following categories:

• Understanding of the topic
• Originality, Creativity and Innovation
• Inspirational power
• Communication and presentation of idea (effective use of chosen medium)

All work should be original and the students 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.

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

We understand that for some students English may be a second language and therefore do not mark down for syntax.

If students choose to use AI to support them in their research, then it is important they do not use AI tools to generate an entry and submit it as if it was their own work. The use of generative AI must be acknowledged in the bibliography (as detailed below) where it has been used as a functional tool to assist in the process of creating submissions.

Minimum requirement to include in bibliography:

• 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.
• The prompt(s) 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 summarise my initial notes and to proofread my final draft.

The top entry Finalists and Honourable Mentions will be announced on the Winners page of our website on Thursday 1st May 2025. 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 on the 23rd May 2025 and will be officially announced at our Education Summit in Summer 2025.

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 our Finalists and Honourable Mentions will be available on the 12th May 2025.

Certificates are uploaded to our TSL Certificate Portal (https://certificates.trustforsustainableliving.org/index.php) and can be accessed and downloaded by Teacher Champions using their registered login details.

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.