School Report

This information and communication technology (ICT)-based educational project involves creating linkages between the news media and academic institutions, to the end of helping develop news reporting practice with groups of young students. Individual schools or City Learning Centres (CLCs) working with one or more schools implement the initiative by running lessons or sessions, using resources such as those available on the BBC News School Report website to support the development of ideas and practice, and to enable students to work in roles concerned with news reporting and production. For instance, teachers using the set of specific lesson plans offered here may access both high-tech and low-tech ways of engaging students in questions such as "what makes the headlines?". With the help of teachers and specialist advisors, the lessons and activities on this website have been mapped to the relevant sections of the National Curriculum (for students in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland) and the curriculum in Scotland.

Participatory, interactive classroom activities are designed to help students use props such as real news photographs printed from online news sources (or from printed newspapers, magazines, etc.) to develop a news story and then to create a schedule, or a "running order" for a news programme. BBC News values (such as truth and accuracy, balancing the right to report with respect for privacy, safeguarding children, and being accountable to the audience) guide lessons - enhanced through video instruction by BBC journalists, available online - such as how to bring one's story to life with video, photographs, graphics, and sound effects in a way that is clear and correct (i.e., legal).

Following involvement in these lessons, student groups engage in practice news days throughout the autumn and spring terms in their schools (or a local CLC), working in groups (with students from their own school, or from neighbouring schools) to plan and anticipate problems that may arise during the March day on which their productions will appear in venues including television, radio, online, mobile telephone, and print. While often supported by mentors from the BBC, as well as teachers, students are encouraged to take the lead. By the News Day (held in March each year), students had to have produced and edited their news stories to be ready for broadcast. (Students can use reports they have prepared in advance and reports produced on the day, like BBC journalists.) They can cover local news stories from their schools and communities, as well as national and international stories. During News Day 2008, students and their work were featured on the News Channel, Breakfast News, the One O'clock and Six O'clock News, and Newsround; Radio Five Live, Radio 4, and 40 local radio
stations; 12 regional TV stations; BBC Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland; and many local and national BBC websites. The School Report website also became a TV channel and a radio station, streaming pupils' news reports and coverage of school-based activities throughout the school day.

Education, Children.

BBC journalist Alex Robertson, who worked with Shawlands Academy in Glasgow on News Day 2007, said: "Students produced an explosive piece of original journalism about asylum seekers, featuring the experience of a pupil at the school. It was amazing to see them researching a story from within the school about a subject that is a huge issue in Scotland. Their report was featured by BBC Scotland and Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, published an article about it on the School Report website after speaking to one of the students on the phone."