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It’s just nine weeks to go until Thursday March 24 BBC News School Report’s ‘News Day’ when schools across the UK turn their classrooms into newsrooms and thousands of 11 to 14-year-olds become BBC School Reporters, producing real news for a real audience. 

We’re in our fifth year and we’ve worked with over 1000 schools, placing BBC mentors in many of them, supporting and encouraging students to engage with news. 

Yesterday was a ‘Practice News Day’  for the schools taking part and we gathered stories and updated a live feed on the School Report website. School Reporters covered a wide variety of stories including the dangers of texting while walking, how teenagers are stereotyped by some shop assistants and the new changes to education. 

I spoke to Daniel, 15 from Bolton School Boys Division during the day to get an update from his school.  He's a pupil mentor on the project, "It was chaos at first because of network issues, we had people fixing software all around us but in the end it did get fixed... I like the rush to get it all finished in time and think through the consequences if something doesn't work." As well as the challenge of finding the facts on a story, that's exactly why researchers say School Report works so well – it's authentic. On News Day every school taking part publishes their news on their website and we link to them all from an interactive map.

School Report helps the BBC fulfil its public purpose to “sustain citizenship and civil society”. It does this in three ways: by engaging young people with news, by bringing their voices and stories to a wider audience and by sharing some of the BBC’s public service values such as fairness, accuracy and impartiality since so many young people are distributing their own content now.  

Yesterday Education Secretary Michael Gove announced  that he would review England's national curriculum. School Report has been designed to work with any level of ability, any group size, and with any of the curricula in the 4 nations of the UK so I’m confident we’ll stay relevant whatever the review finds. 

Registration for this year’s News Day is closed but sign up for next year or try out our teaching resources. On our website you can find out more about what we do and see the content produced at last year’s News Day.

Let me know what you think by commenting below.

Helen Shreeve is Editor of BBC News School Report

Read a previous blog from Helen Shreeve

Follow us on Twitter: BBCSchoolReport

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On Monday night this week BBC Outreach hosted an event to celebrate and encourage our connections with the community in West London especially those in and around White City, the home of the BBC's largest working site. The idea of the get together was to give local partners, organisations, residents and staff a great opportunity to talk to each other. It also gave the BBC the chance to highlight some of the work we are already doing in the local community through our staff volunteering to support a range of different projects.
 
One of the schemes we referred to was the school reading scheme we manage with the Hammersmith and Fulham Education Business Partnership. A considerable number of our staff give up their lunchtimes once a week to visit local schools and spend time reading with the pupils. Some are struggling with reading in the classroom and they really benefit from the one-to-one attention they receive. One of these volunteers, Simon Broad, spoke about his experiences and the value he himself gets from taking part in the scheme. It is clearly a two-way process of benefit to both participants. The children gain in self confidence. The reader gains a huge amount of satisfaction in seeing the child's abilities grow.

The event also gave us the opportunity to refer to several other projects including BBC lawyers volunteering to go into local schools to discuss legal issues of interest to the students; our long-standing support for the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and the work they do with many young people; our tours of Television Centre for local residents and our free screenings for local children notably the Doctor Who Christmas special in December. One of our newest projects is with Fulham Football Club, giving some of our staff the chance to volunteer to teach soccer skills to young people. To be fair to the loyalties of local residents I think we'll be starting a similar scheme with QPR shortly!

Our very latest project is particularly exciting as it involves young people in West London getting to know young people in Salford where new BBC offices will open in May. It is called 'Take Two' and will be asking our staff to volunteer as mentors to help young people improve their communication skills. We are very much looking forward to running lots of twinning activities with the students in both places. Indeed it was off to Salford I went the morning after our West London event. It won't be long now before staff start to arrive in our new offices there in Media City. BBC Outreach will be doing all it can to make sure we have a very active presence in the local Salford community.

Alec McGivan is Head of BBC Outreach

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Today we have published the latest detailed quarterly expenses of our 110 most senior executives at the Corporation, covering the period July-September 2010. This is part of our continuing programme of transparency, and is the sixth time that we have published quarterly expenses. The headline is that total expense claims are down 35% year-on-year.

We’re also publishing more detail on Senior Manager pay than ever before, with information about the salary levels of the remaining 462 permanent Licence Fee-funded Senior Managers at the BBC. We know that Licence Fee payers want more information about how we spend their money, and this disclosure demonstrates that the BBC is continuing to lead the way in being open and transparent.

Finally, a quick update on our progress in reducing the number of Senior Managers and the amount we pay them at the BBC. Up to the end of December, we had cut the Senior Manager paybill by 13.6% and the number of senior managers by 8.5% from their August 2009 levels. By the end of the year we will make further reductions in order to deliver a 25% reduction in the pay bill and 20% reduction in headcount.

You can read more about our approach to reducing executives and talent pay here.

Caroline Thomson is the BBC's Chief Operating Officer

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