Schools shown how to transform their classrooms into newsrooms

The students from Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and the UK, whose schools are already working on collaborative curriculum projects under the British Council’s Connecting Classrooms programme, will work together over the coming year to set their own news agenda and publish their own stories in their own words. 

Their teachers will be trained at the BBC in London between 5 and 8 October 2009 to learn how to transform their pupils into student journalists.  During the training, the teachers will have a go at making their own news and will learn how to run a student newsroom.  They will be supported during and after the event by local journalists, who will act as mentors to the participating schools over the course of the project.

The training event is part of a broader initiative developed by the British Council and BBC News School Report to introduce student journalism as a focus for schools working in international partnerships.  The project is the first time that schools from the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa have worked together on School Report and aims to engage young people with news and international current affairs, hear their voices and stories, and encourage them to think about the ethics of news-making.  Forty-five schools – 15 in the UK and six in each of the participating African countries – will take part in the pilot project, which the team hope to roll out more widely in the future.

On their return from London, the trained teachers will cascade their learning to the teachers and students in their schools.  The newly trained student journalists will then work with their international partners to report what’s important to them as young people.  In particular, they will be reporting around the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 and around the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in summer 2010. 

The African schools will also join their UK partners and hundreds of other UK schools to participate in the BBC School Report News Day on 11 March 2010.  On the News Day, the students will work to a strict deadline to publish stories with a local, national or international focus on their school websites. 

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For more press information regarding the British Council please contact Paul Melhuish on 020 7389 4871 or paul.melhuish@britishcouncil.org or for BBC News School Report contact Francesca Sostero on 020 8576 8928 or francesca.sostero@bbc.co.uk

Notes to Editors

BBC News School Report gives 11-14 year-old students in the UK the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience.  Using lesson plans and materials from the website, and with support from BBC staff, teachers help students develop their journalistic skills to become School Reporters.  In March, schools take part in an annual News Day, simultaneously creating video, audio and text-based news reports and publishing them on a school website, to which the BBC aims to link. For more information please visit www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport 

The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations. We work in over 100 countries worldwide to build engagement and trust for the UK through the exchange of knowledge and ideas between people. We work in the arts, education, science, sport and governance and last year we reached over 128 million people. We are a non-political organisation which operates at arm’s length from government. Our total turnover in 2007/8 was £565 million, of which our grant-in-aid from the British government was £197 million. For every pound of grant we receive, we generate an additional £1.92. For more information, please visit www.britishcouncil.org

Connecting Classrooms Connecting Classrooms builds lasting partnerships between schools in the UK and others around the world. Through these partnerships, the programme develops trust and understanding between young people in different societies, creating a safer and more connected world for the future. For more information, please visit: www.britishcouncil.org/connectingclassrooms

For further information on resources for schools and teachers please visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldclass/download/world_class_school_report.pdf