BBC School Report: “We expect the best and that’s what they give us”

Helen Shreeve is Editor of BBC School Report, an annual schools’ project which, this year, takes place today. Here she explains why the project is such an important learning opportunity for schoolchildren.

As founding editor, I’ve been involved right from the start with School Report. Now in its 9^th year, it’s a project which offers schools from across the UK the opportunity to broadcast for real. It’s not a competition. Nor is it about selecting winners who get to participate. The concept is very straightforward: it is that every single person taking part really does do it for real. Any young person of any ability can participate – telling the story of something that’s really happened – and you can take part in different ways; maybe publishing a photo gallery, or making an amazing 40 minute documentary, or writing or creating an audio interview. Take a look at the School Report website now for a taste of the wide variety of content our talented participants have made.

When the project was set up eight years ago, two things coincided, bringing the idea into being. Back then, the BBC and other media outlets, broadcasters and newspapers had been concerned for a long time that news wasn’t appealing to a teenage audience. So, we developed a pilot project inviting 13 year olds to run a single ‘News Day’ at the BBC, producing news stories which mattered to them. We wanted to see if that might be a good way of engaging young people. At the same time BBC News was embarking on making more use of linking out to other organisations and schools were already building their own websites on which their pupils would publish their School Report contributions. The project would link back to those websites. That was really key to helping schoolchildren feel as though they had contributed to a much larger endeavour.

The BBC School Report team and their volunteer mentors are not teachers. I’m not a teacher either but very early on we recruited teachers who were also broadcasters on to the team to give us this vital perspective. Importantly, the project is not only about outreach, it’s about representation of young people on the news and getting their stories to a wider audience. Time after time young people say that they don’t feel represented, and many think we only talk about young people when they’re doing something bad. No surprises then that at the end of each School Report we’re nearly always guaranteed to get feedback saying: ‘It’s so great to hear from normal teenagers doing normal stuff’.

The biggest thing that’s changed since the project began is undoubtedly the way that our target age group consumes information: now, it’s online which has been central to our impact in schools, making us much more relevant to potential participants. Nowadays too everybody is a content producer and a content distributor. In school it’s often very difficult to have a forum in which the values and the ethics of how you make and share content are discussed – for example, what are the repercussions if you film and post something which is really unfair? That’s a key part of the School Report project: trying to ensure is that there is space to have discussions at school about the values behind content production and distribution. Those ethics and values chime with those of the BBC – and link in to PSHE (Personal social health education) content in the curriculum. So School Report contributes to a learning programme for this country’s young people too.

Pupils, teachers and evaluators all agree that it’s important that they’re actually being made to adhere to a deadline and do all of this on a particular ‘news day’, and that the requirements also demand truth and accuracy. That’s why BBC School Report works: because we expect the best and that’s what they give us.

The impact of the project is beginning to feed through. It is now often in young people’s applications for work experience at the BBC – we’ve also had some really great young people who have got into work or college actually using the portfolio that they’ve produced for the project as part of the evidence to get into university.

It’s the sort of thing the BBC excels at. And it’s a project which is everywhere outside of London too, one which goes to the heart of the local community. Every year, every local radio station has joined in on ‘News Day’ – an amazing commitment. All those radio stations every single year, come thick or thin whatever their staffing problems, they have all – every single one - joined in. That is the absolute backbone of whole project, and the BBC has the most amazing resource in that. It’s those sort of local connections in every community that have really made the project flourish.

We’ve worked with nearly 2,000 schools over the last nine years - it’s getting on for half the secondary schools in the country - and a very, very large number of young people. Of course every time you work with a young person it impacts on their family and the wider community as well, so School Report is something which can reach far and wide. I am immensely proud of my team and what they have achieved over the years working with hundreds of teachers who approach the project with so much enthusiasm every year. It is a great achievement and I very much hope you’ll take a moment to see what the young people broadcast this School Report News Day.

Helen Shreeve is Editor of BBC School Report.

• Find out more about BBC School Report.
• Keep up to date with events as they happen by following @BBCSchoolReport on twitter.