Well, not quite, but it’s an interesting project being piloted in Cambridge. Kids are being given cards that entitle them to £500 to spend on specified activities. It’s Government funded to the tune of £1 million. Full story
4 March 2008
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has announced the preferred bidder for the contract to deliver Teachers TV.
Education Digital 2, a consortium of Ten Alps PLC and ITN, is in final negotiations over the £50m five-year contract to provide high quality news, information and resources to people who work in schools.
Mark Link
It’s here if you want to see it:
We’re the only partner, which is good, but it would have been nice to have our logo on every page.
Asher
One of the articles I found on Voice It1 (see previous post), written by one of the student ‘journalists’ was about the newly created position of Chair of the Youth Citizenship Commission. This commission will:
- Examine what citizenship means to young people.
- Consider how to increase young people’s participation in politics; the development of citizenship among disadvantaged groups; how active citizenship can be promoted through volunteering and community engagement.
- Lead a consultation on whether the voting age should be lowered to 16.
It has a small budget attached (£6m). I think we should try to get a meeting with him and see whether he will support the Standard (and maybe more).
Full article >>
At my meeting with Futurelab one of the other people there was from synergy.tv. One of their big projects is www.radiowaves.co.uk which allows schools to create their own radio stations for free. This could be a great tool for school councils. An offshoot of this is Voice It! which is particularly about using those tools for campaigning.
Mark had a meeting with David Regis from SHEU on Friday (Greg joined us for most of the meeting). SHEU has carried out “lifestyle – health and social – surveys with hundreds of thousands of young people for over 30 years”. Local authorities and others pay them to do surveys (as a base line/ monitoring exercise) – the schools participate in return for getting a comprehensive report showing them how they are doing and compare their results with other schools in their area that they can use .