The inaugural edition of the FIDE World Schools Team Championship will take place in Aktau, Kazakhstan, from August 3-8, 2023. About 50 teams representing schools from all around the world will compete in U12 and U18 age categories.

Many of them are winners of their national school chess championships. For them, the FIDE flagship event stands on top of the existing school chess competitions. Here we introduce some of the teams that will soon go to Aktau to battle for the title of the World Cchool Champions:

A U12 team from Belgium is made up of Sint-Pietersinstituut Turnhout school pupils (pictured below). “In our school, everyone can play chess from the age of 6,” said Team Captain Dusty Bracke, “Kids have lessons during lunch breaks: they eat while they have a short instruction lesson, and then they play. It is done once a week for a 6-7 age group and twice a week for older pupils. Next year we plan to give chess lessons in kindergarten too. We know playing with teams from different countries will be a great experience. Now we are getting ready for the tournament. Normally it would be summer break, but we attend chess lessons every Friday and have online lessons from an International Master.”

One of their future competitors, the team of the Silver Stream Public School from Canada (pictured at the top of this article), took first place in the 2023 Canadian School Team Championship and punched their ticket to Aktau. “Chess was not going well in our school, and we had a chess club only for students of grades 7 and 8, but a new chess club for all grades will be in place in the next school year of 2023-2024. Our team has been diligently working to improve as quickly as possible before the tournament. We practice every day, engaging in activities such as solving puzzles, practicing our chess skills, and more. Additionally, we attend chess camps, participate in chess tournaments, and focus on addressing our weaknesses. We would like to build a good reputation for Canada in the chess world, and hope to meet a lot of people from different countries and experience a world-class tournament,” said the captain of U12 team Canada, Yan Sun.

Another Canadian team is going to play in the U18 category and is made up of students of Upper Canada College, Toronto (pictured above). “Chess has become an extremely popular pastime amongst the student population in our country. At UCC, we have a chess club with over 70 members, making it one of the largest clubs at the school,” said the captain Shixiong Liu. “In Kazakhstan, we’re hoping to play our best chess to finish high on the standings and also make some friends along the way.”

On another continent, a U12 team representing School Lycee MIRVA from Madagascar is working hard to prepare for the World Schools Team Championship in Aktau. The school chess program was launched there in 2015 for children aged from 6 to 9, so the team line-up has some very strong players, including Ny Andolalaina Fitia Noah Rabarison, U8 and U12 champion of Madagascar, 4-time champion of Analamanga region. “The team is training four times a week. We are reading chess literature and play online. Of course, we want to win the title in Aktau, but we also expect a new adventure, where we could meet a new culture and make new acquaintances, and, more than that, acquire an atmosphere of solidarity between teams,” said Andrianantenaina Ramalanjaona, captain of Madagascar team.

FIDE believes chess is a powerful tool for education, social inclusion, and personal growth. That is why promoting and supporting chess activities for children and schools around the world is one of the main priorities of the international federation. According to the survey made in the summer of 2020 by FIDE and the European Chess Union, over 25 million children participate in chess activities in school. And FIDE aims to double that number! The World Schools Team Championship will be one more step towards achieving this goal.