The BBC’s new senior schools outreach manager, Margaret Burgin, sets out her vision for BBC staff and young people working together on School Report News Day and beyond.
‘I ionately believe that we need to listen to the voices of our younger audiences so that we have an audience in the future’
I am always struck by the fresh ideas and sheer energy young people bring to the news agenda.
It all started for me in local radio at BBC Radio Sheffield where we hosted a “radio station” for the Sheffield Children’s Festival which featured young people who produced and presented their own programmes.
There were lighter features, too - a satirical soap called Jarvis Cocker Street and a precursor to something like The Apprentice where the regular presenters at BBC Radio Sheffield were fired one by one. This project thrived, and we even did an exchange with South African schools for the Africa Season in 2004.
When News Action decided to pilot the schools project which eventually became School Report they invited me to an ideas day with other BBC staff with experience of working with schools – a really exciting day with like-minded colleagues.
Since then, I have done a number of BBC projects that have involved children and young people producing content; from schools versions of Dragon’s Den and Waterloo Road to projects with the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Learning and Blue Peter. I’ve also volunteered for School Report and I have never lost the sense of exhilaration which comes from working with groups of young people, who come up with fresh new ideas and ways of working.
School Report is now in its 11th year. When it started in 2005 the iPhone was in ‘secret’ development, YouTube was launching its first video, and Facebook’s then 5.5m s were restricted to high school and college students. Crucially, in 2005 only 15% of the world’s population was connected to the internet. It’s nearly half now and projected to be at two-thirds by 2020. Our generation of School Reporters aged 11 – 16 in 2017 have never known a world without the internet and all that it brings.
The other reason I love School Report is that it gives us the opportunity to help young people negotiate an increasingly complex media world. In recent weeks, for example, the world is beset by stories about fake news. As we now work with around a quarter of the UK’s secondary schools and reach over 60,000 children, we have a real opportunity to make a difference. We can give young people the tools to check their news and work out whether it may be accurate or not.
School Report has become a partnership between BBC News, BBC Academy, BBC Children’s and BBC Sport. This gives us a new framework with extra expertise. We have all the Academy experience in journalism training and the BBC Outreach expertise of staff volunteering. We have worked with Children’s to produce our er, and Sport to curate content for our My Team initiative.
And, of course, all of the News experience of School Report content over the last 10 years.
This year for News Day we have a focus on the mental health of young people, and that will be the subject of an event in London. Across the country at least 400 School Reporters will come in to BBC buildings in Northern Ireland, Wales, Birmingham and Norwich.
In Salford, March 16th is a Big Digital Day with groups of pupils from schools across the north curating web content, making their own reports and finding out more about how to create digital content. We want as many staff as possible to meet our 11 – 16s so we know what their lives are like. We are also planning a few surprises for staff which might include a quiz to see who could a 2017 GCSE exam!
The other great thing about School Report is BBC mentors who work in schools and BBC volunteers who help on News Day. Volunteering is a win-win for everyone. Staff get to meet an underserved audience of 11 – 16s and to take that knowledge back to their departments. It helps career development.
School Report is a universal project. We have a complete variety of schools g up, including independent and special schools, to reflect the UK population of 4.3m 11-16 year-olds as accurately as possible.
Following News Day, BBC Outreach will concentrate on the 11 – 16s audience, so that as well as School Report outreach, our staff volunteers can choose to encourage STEM subjects in school, or to become a School Governor, or run an employability workshop in a school.
