According to the WHO and the UN, sustainable development should not just be included in syllabuses but must be a driver for change in behaviour. Yet, if citizens do not engage, all attempts at change and sustainable development are bound to fail. In the EU, burning issues such as climate change, rejection of political credibility that often leads to extremism, conspicuous consumption and obesity cannot be addressed by politicians alone: citizens are needed. Schools are supposed to form citizens, but change cannot be brought about by teachers just telling students what to think and young people asked to be passive. What is vitally needed is a sustainable development plan based on citizen commitment, and schools can have a great impact. Fostering Commitment in Young Europeans (FcyE) is a two-year project bringing together approximately 120 students aged 16-18 from four European high schools, situated in Germany, France, Poland and Spain. In each school, activities will be led by 5 or 6 teacher-mentors, including experienced and new educators, thereby creating a dynamic for incremental change. They will advise and teach students in weekly sessions and via social media, to encourage them to throw themselves nationally and transnationally into real-life issues—diet, mobility, consumption and a sustainable, eco-friendly environment—to commit to and drive forward necessary change. If students want to succeed they will need to work as a cohesive transnational team, which is why we have focussed heavily on improving their communication skills in English, the project language. Indeed, FcyE only has meaning as part of a Europe-wide collaboration as today’s issues can’t be solved by any single nation alone. Hope of solution must include partnership, listening to others and concessions. And thanks to best practice in each country, the transnational groups can use the talents of the many. But rather than concentrating on traditional language or even CLIL lessons, staff aim to teach practical, hands-on things like cooking, growing food, recycling clothes and waste, and looking at what seasonal produce our regions provide. Staff will engage differently with participants to find a balanced diet, fight against the pressure to buy certain products, despite heavy advertising campaigns, and indicate how plastic can be reduced, as well as highlighting the need to factor reduced mobility and transport in general into plans.The first year of the project will focus on the students and their school environment. After carrying out research as part of one of 5 specific workgroups—food, diet, recycling waste, energy and water, and clothes—students will have the chance to organise an awareness week and an evening event to sensitise students and parents to the issues they have been working on. During the second year of the project, the focus will switch to the wider community: the local area, the region and Europe as a whole. As a result, the food and diet workgroups will merge and a new fifth group created: mobility and transport. Participants will find out all that has been happening around them, by contacting, meeting and questioning locally elected representatives, companies and associations relevant to their topic, before coming up with five-year plans to address environmental, societal, health and dietary issues in their schools and local areas. Finally, participants will learn how relevant the European institutions are for their future and at the final event in Brussels, they will bring concrete proposals to the European Commission and Parliament.FcyE aims specifically to give young people a voice, a role and a whole range of competences that will help prepare them for their future studies and lives, motivating them as they realise they are learning real-life skills. Thanks to FcyE’s Individual Project Evaluation Tool (IPET) they will plot their progress in fourteen transversal and key competences for lifelong learning: confidence and maturity, organisational skills, time management, teamwork, taking initiatives, assuming responsibility, carrying out research into major issues, gaining new ICT skills, acquiring presenting and selling skills, developing video skills, honing writing skills, improving their MFL (here English), cross-cultural awareness, and devising, carrying out and interpreting surveys. By equipping them so comprehensively and enabling them to understand their power as consumers and citizens, they will be able to engage in a political dialogue with their fellow citizens. In the long run, a simplistic ‘top-down’ approach doesn’t work either at school or in politics. Our European schools should be focussed on fostering relationships of understanding, trust and commitment, not dispensing dry knowledge: the central outcome of our project will be changed individuals and a better future for our schools, local areas and Europe. This is what sustainable development is all about.