As a result of Newsknight's remarkable success in the shine awards, three pupils and Mr McDermott were offered the opportunity to go to the Times education supplement in London. The day consisted of the students taking part in various workshops with senior members of tes editorial staff
The day started at around 9:45 am where we met the editor, Ann Mroz. She organised the event and we also met with two other schools who had won Shine awards. After a brief introduction, we began the first workshop with Ed Dorrell, the deputy editor. This workshop consisted of writing a profile and introduction to a piece from gaining information from an interview. As a group, we decided to do our piece on Donald Trump as he is an interesting character who we were all knowledgeable about. During this process, myself and Bill Bowkett played the role of an interviewer whilst Joe Royal played Trump. After a very productive interview, myself and Bill came up with an introduction which Bill presented to the audience. The presentation was greeted with positive feedback and a round of applause. We also met up with the Shine Awards' Alison Strachan (pictured with our team) who'd kindly organised the trip to TES.
The next workshop was the news workshop with Irena Barker. This consisted of writing a news piece from the actual government press release on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. The article required a lot of thought due the format of the piece and the confusion over the events. Despite all the difficulties, with excellent team-work and communication, we managed to analyse the article in significant depth. Irena taught the groups how to structure a news report which helped our writing immensely. After a lot of thorough planning, we managed to come up with a strong introduction that also offered concise detail.
The end of this workshop lead to lunch which was of a very high standard. They provided us with a choice of sandwiches, San Pellegrino’s, Hobgoblin crisps and exotic fruit. After a delightful lunch, Mr McDermott took us out to get a welcome hot beverage which we were very grateful for.
The next workshop were sub-editing tasks with Sarah Cunnane. In this task, we had ten titles to judge on whether they were good or not, analyse a current piece TES have recently printed and then come up with our own title. However, in this workshop there was a bit of a twist in the sense that we got split up into different teams. This enabled us to engage with pupils from other schools and explore different ideas. In this task, everyone threw great ideas and opinions which were accepted by all. This allowed us more creativity in the sense we had to “think outside the basket”.
The last workshop of the day was with Helen Amass (an ex-KTS pupil!). She assigned us a task in which we had to come up with our own magazine. After a quick brainstorm, we came up with the idea to have it online with the main focus being Youtube. Our print and online magazine was designed to provide the best insight into YouTube and other platforms for a young readership. After quick planning due to the limited amount of time we had, we presented successfully to the other groups.
As the day came to a conclusion, it is fair to say that the trip was very enjoyable and productive. The different leaders shared a lot of valuable knowledge and skills which inspired me to be a journalist.
Read Mr McDermott's piece for the Times Educational Supplement