Get Set for Positive Energy!

Through our five-year partnership with Team GB and ParalympicsGB, we’re empowering young people and athletes to make a positive difference with Get Set for Positive Energy. It’s designed to inspire primary school children to use their positive energy to drive the change towards a greener, fairer future…with plenty of Olympic-inspired fun along the way!

To kick-start the initiative in 2024, we provided free curriculum linked resources that aimed to introduce primary school students to renewable energy and sustainable living in an exciting and engaging way, whilst encouraging them to get involved in our competition to design a sustainable school of the future.

We had thousands of creative and exciting entries, making it a really tough job for our panel of judges to select just five winning schools! Sandwich Infant School in Kent took first place and were awarded a British Gas Positive Energy Grant of £15,000. Meanwhile grants of £2,500 went to our runners up - St Paul’s CofE Primary School in Manchester, Glastonbury Thorn School in Milton Keynes, Sunhill Junior School in Hampshire and Linby cum Papplewich CofE Primary School in Nottingham. To put the grants to good use, each of the winning schools gain expert advice from British Gas on ways they can become more energy efficient as they work towards greener and more inclusive schools.  

Following its success, we now launched our Everyday Energy Competition in 2025. This challenges the students to create a banner that’ll inspire their community to make small, energy saving changes every day. The winning pupil’s design will receive a £5,000 Positive Energy Grant to support their school in becoming more sustainable and accessible, with their design brought to life on a weather-proof banner and unveiled by a Team GB or ParalympicsGB athlete. Twenty-five lucky runners-up will also receive a grant of £500 to boost their eco-club or other sustainability-led education.

Alongside these competitions, we’ve a big focus on running Get Set for Positive Energy workshops at primary schools. As part of our goal to give 100,000 days in local communities, our colleague volunteers have rolled up their sleeves to run workshops that help young people understand the role they can play to make greener choices and build healthier habits including:

• Understanding what renewable energy is
• What role they can play in creating a happier, healthier, greener future for everyone.
• Ways they can inspire change at home, school and in the community
• Learning about the science of energy
• Hints and tips on ways to save energy

Helen Pope, Customer Resolution Agent at British Gas said “The children were all very keen to share their new-found sustainability knowledge and put it to good use following the Get Set for Positive Energy workshops. As a former teacher and passionate volunteer, I was over the moon to be able to share my skills with the students to energise a greener, fairer future and look forward to signing up to more workshops in the future.” 

Get Set for Positive Energy is now fully off the starting blocks. So much so that the partnership has already engaged over 550,000 young people as we work towards our ambition to reach up to 1m children and their families across the UK by 2028.

Visit the Get Set for Positive Energy website for more.