Recent years have seen young people across the UK tackle the most pressing socio-political issues in order to make a positive change for the future.​

In 2020, a year afflicted with uncertainty, and worry, new research conducted by Samsung showed that nine in ten 18-25-year-olds felt that compassion and technology were key to building a better future for everyone. ​

This insight was pivotal to phase 2 of ‘Not A School’. Building on the success of 2019’s inaugural programme, we extended 2020’s to a wider audience and pivoted online in response to Covid-19 conditions.

We enrolled non-traditional course mentors, considered experts in their field to teach students about the all-important 4C’s: creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking, as well as more general life skills. All crafted with the intention of enabling young people to become game-changers of the future by offering the skills, support and technology know-how to pioneer a better world.

To launch the programme we created a hero film starring British rapper Lady Leshurr, giving an insight into the course themes and encouraging young people to sign-up.​

Along with Lady Leshurr, we also enlisted Editor-in-chief of gal-dem, Liv Little and filmmaker and climate activist, Jack Harries to each deliver a keynote on the course topics most relevant to them.

Through a partnership with online learning experts FutureLearn, Samsung Not A School 2020 was fully optimised for virtual collaboration, before making the course publicly accessible for the first time, with access to their database of 12m learners worldwide.

The campaign was rolled out across Samsung’s and influencer’s own social channels and via FutureLearn.