School Report Day A Great Success

 

45 pupils from 3 Hounslow secondary schools, 6 months of preparation, 3 practice days and a great amount of effort and enthusiasm has lead to a wonderfully successful news day for all involved. The pupils arrived full of excitement and already having an idea of the day's top news stories. It didn't take long for them to have a list of possible news items. The editors did a great job of prioritising the items and allocating the journalists to them.

The next step was to gather all the information together and to check their facts. As well trained news reporters, they knew the importance of checking their sources and so confirmed their facts against several news websites and daily newspapers.

 

 

Next came the scriptwriting process. 60 words seemed easy until the pupils realised that to keep within that limit they were going to have to be very choosy about the information that they reported. Nevertheless, the scripts were written, written again, checked, re-written and finally compiled into one long script for the newsreaders, sound person, vt operator, director, radio broadcast assistants to work with.

Teachers and CLC staff worked through the day to ensure that the pupils were on task and had everything they needed to produce the news. Some groups collected vox pops out on the street whilst some documented the day with photographs and video interviews. CLC staff also worked behind the scenes to ensure that the end result could be streamed over the internet live.

 

 

This was all achieved and the television and radio news went to air on schedule. The presenters, after a couple of practices, rose to the occasion and performed brilliantly, getting round the long names and difficult pronunciations with relative ease. The studio crews worked under pressure to ensure that buttons were pushed, videos played, microphones turned on and pre recorded audio played all at the right time. Whilst the broadcast news swan graced the screens the collective feet paddled furiously to ensure everything went to plan.

 

 

Well done to all the pupils, teachers and staff that were involved in the project. We have all learned a great deal from this experience and no doubt next year will be a whole new challenge!

Make sure you watch our news reports and check out the other schools and CLC's that took part by clicking on the BBC's School Report page below.