BBC News School Report gives 11-16 year-old students in the UK the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience.
It is a collaborative project run by BBC News and BBC Learning.
Using lesson plans and materials from this website, and with support from BBC staff and partners, 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.
On 27 March 2014 Harwich and Dovercourt High School joined this project with several artciles and videos, these are listed below.
How To Improve Harwich Shops
Epilepsy awareness Day ! But are people actually aware ?
Epilepsy awareness day was yesterday on the 26th March 2014, yet 100% of the people we polled were not aware of this. Although everyone that we asked had some awareness of the illness itself, many were uncertain about what the condition exactly entailed—despite some people actually suffering from the condition themselves. We asked the public what they knew and understood about epilepsy.
So what is epilepsy?
Epilepsy is a physical condition that occurs when there is a sudden or brief change in how the brain works which causes seizures.
In the UK over 600,000 people have been affected by epilepsy, but less than 10 students out of 1200 in Harwich and Dovercourt High School have been affected.
Misconceptions are common—
One person spoken to said that epilepsy was “where you have a lesion on the brain and it causes you to have fits and seizures” this is partly true, however this is not always the case; as it can be conflicted by many different circumstances such as Alcohol abuse, brain tumours, blood clots and problems at birth.
Teachers – Saints or sinners?
Yesterday teachers in the NUT union went on strike and many schools across the country were closed or partly closed.
Teachers have been striking intermittently over the past two years citing the reasons for this is as low pay for the amount of hours they work and poor working conditions. New reforms to pensions brought in by the coalition government in 2010 stipulate that teachers must now work until they are sixty five years old.
Teachers find the work tiring and stressful. They claim that most people do not understand just how much work actually goes into the job and the extent to which their wages do not reflect the workload.
A local man interviewed said that the situation is “disgusting and that teachers shouldn’t be allowed to strike – that they are lucky enough to have a job.” However, most of the locals say that they do not have a problem with the teachers on strike.
School staff maintain that they have a right to strike just as much as anyone else. The unions claim to be trying to get better conditions for staff and students alike.
