From British Schools to the World Stage: SNS’s Growing Global Influence

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When I founded SNS, my focus was, and remains, the young people sitting in British classrooms—the teenagers navigating a social media landscape saturated with conflict, polarisation, and misinformation. The students who will one day be citizens, voters, and leaders, and who deserve the tools to think critically, listen deeply, and disagree well.

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Somewhere along the way, the rest of the world has started knocking on our door.

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This academic year, the SNS team has contributed to training and advisory work at some of the most significant education and civic forums on the planet. We have presented at EPNA in Rome, UNESCO events in both Helsinki and Luxembourg, the Global Student Leadership Conference here in London, the NECE Lab in Bucharest, and joined UNESCO and the Australian Government for a convening to train, advise, and support teachers across Australia. We’ve also spoken at the European Commission in Brussels on peace education pedagogy and approaches to countering prejudice in schools.

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Next month, we will be training a team from Switzerland who are setting up their own education programme on Israel-Palestine—and over the course of the past couple of years, organisations and educators from South Africa, the USA, Canada, Poland, Australia, and Germany have reached out to us for guidance and support.

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It is both humbling and energising. We are, as far as we are aware, the only organisation in the world with a fully developed, school-tested pedagogy for handling Israel-Palestine in educational settings—a framework built not to tell young people what to think, but to give them the skills and the space to think for themselves. The fact that we have built something that educators on multiple continents are seeking out tells us something important: this need is not ours alone.

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Democracies across the world are under pressure—from polarisation, from the erosion of shared civic space, and from cultures of outrage that reward heat over light. If democracy is to survive and thrive into the second half of this century, young people everywhere need to be taught how to engage across difference, disagreement, and seemingly irreconcilable divides.

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Conflict resolution and dialogue skills are not extras. They are not nice-to-haves for the especially tolerant or the politically engaged. They are the foundation of a functioning democratic society, contribute to positive mental wellbeing for young people, and they belong in every school curriculum.

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There is a practical dimension to this international work too, and it’s one I’m genuinely proud of. The income generated through our global leadership role—through training, advisory partnerships, and conference contributions—directly supplements our core work in British schools. It means that when we take our paired Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders into classrooms across the UK, we are partly resourced by a world that recognises the value of what we do, which feels right.

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We are under no illusions about the scale of the challenges we face. But we are also genuinely hopeful—because everywhere we go, we meet educators who believe what we believe, students who are hungry for something more honest than the polarised narratives they’re fed online, and institutions willing to take peace education seriously.

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The world is learning and we are learning alongside it.

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