The FINANCIAL -- Young people from five African countries and the UK will be trained to make and broadcast their own news stories under a pilot project being launched by the BBC and the British Council.  

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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