Context

A class teacher at Ashmount Primary School in Islington, north London, decided to implement a lunchtime journalism club for a targeted group of pupils that the school felt needed encouragement to gain confidence in writing. Sessions were half an hour in length and began with the group reading existing newspaper and magazine articles to become familiar with the style of journalistic writing, leading to children beginning to write their own articles. Pupils were provided with their own special journalism notebooks.

Pupils’ articles were then included in the school newsletter sent out to parents. This is now a regular part of the school newsletter and a project that the pupils asked to be able to continue.

Aims & principles

The project aimed to increase confidence in writing with a targeted group of 12 underachieving pupils in Year 6 via an engagement with journalistic writing. This was partly because the teacher felt that the year group at that time had quite a lot of experience with fiction writing, but not so much with other forms , but also because report writing had been identified as an area of weakness in the school. Pupils did not have good report-writing vocabularies and seemed less conversant with the techniques of professional writing in this way. It was also felt that the practical approach of journalism and report writing would appeal to boys in particular, who made up the majority of the group.

Summary

Key aims of the project were:

• To increase confidence and enthusiasm for writing in a particular group
• To present pupils with a form of writing that has an obvious practical application
• To present pupils with a method of writing that has a direct relationship to a workplace

In Practice

The teacher decided that she would make the targeted group’s attendance of journalism club compulsory - on reflection, she thought perhaps this may not have been necessary; however, had she not done so, she felt that the pupils may not have attended in the first weeks. As the group’s enthusiasm grew with the passing weeks, it was less necessary to make attendance compulsory as the children loved coming to the sessions.

The inclusion of a professional BBC journalist in one early session really helped to inspire the children and enabled them to see that interesting ways of writing can be used in the workplace.

Outcomes

Pupils taking part in journalism club really enjoyed the sense of importance that writing the reports and having them read by parents and teachers gave them, and now demonstrate greatly improved writing skills and confidence. Pupils show greater engagement in the life of the school by monitoring current events and requesting permission to be able to cover various events for the newsletter, and teachers now often request the “reporters” to come and report on special stories that occur in the school. 

It is hoped that in the future there will be opportunities for the children to have greater involvement in the local community and use their journalistic skills to report on local events. The teacher also plans to involve the group in working with younger pupils in Year 5 to help introduce them to journalistic writing.
Because of the success of this project, the teacher is also planning a book club and other creative writing projects for Year 5.

“The best thing for the children is seeing their work in their Newsletter - and this is definitely the big motivation, especially as no other child’s work is normally put in it,”

Resources

The class teacher used a variety of newspapers and magazines as initial material for the pupils to analyse, and brought in a journalist to talk to the children at the start of the project. 
“Prior to the project starting, most of the children did not really know anything about journalism - but we did have a BBC journalist/news reporter - Reeta Chakrabarti - come in to talk to the whole year group about her work as part of an Aspirations project that we do. That was very useful!”

Contacts

Rebecca Stacey, Class Teacher

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