Citizenship at key stage 4    (Year 10-11)

• Explain the purpose of the unit to pupils. Pupils listen to several pre-recorded news broadcasts and look at several news websites. They analyse them both from a technical viewpoint and from the point of view of bias, breadth, interest, intended audience, etc.
• Pupils prepare and practise editing and recording sample news items. Where the samples have been e-mailed from a local radio station or gathered by cutting and pasting from news websites, pupils should use ICT to edit them.
• In groups, pupils discuss how, if they had selected the samples themselves, they would have made their selections. They discuss, decide upon and write down a set of guidelines they think should be used to check the quality and suitability of material for broadcast, but which do not infringe the rights of the free press, eg they could consider how to balance the right to free speech and the right to privacy.
• Each group feeds back to the class what they discussed. They compare their guidelines with those used by the media, eg the BBC's Producers' Guidelines.
• Extension activity: groups of pupils investigate the rights of the free press, contrasting these with a situation where reporting is controlled or restricted. They research why restrictions are sometimes imposed on the press, eg for the safety of civilians during war, as a result of a political regime. They debate why a free press is important in a democratic society.

• Set a broadcast time in advance of this activity, eg 45 minutes, one hour.
• In different groups of four or five, pupils work as a news team. They discuss and allocate different roles and responsibilities, eg newscaster, chief editor, sub-editors, researchers. They agree how to make group decisions, eg each member of the team has a vote, a selection of the team acts as an editorial board, what to include in their broadcast, how to ensure a balance of views, how to verify the accuracy of any information received, and how to put into practice the editorial guidelines developed in the first activity.
• The team reviews news items as they are received, either 'live' via e-mail from the local radio station or direct from pre-selected news websites. It is important that pupils have access to plenty of news items. The sub-editors use a word processor to edit the items to time (typically three words per spoken second) and to reflect the desired editorial slant, position or balance of views. Pupils can use the word processor's word count facility to help them.
• Give the groups a few more interesting news items in the final minutes before the broadcast deadline. Each broadcast should have a strict time limit, eg three minutes.
• Allow pupils the opportunity to unwind after the broadcasts. They discuss and reflect with others on how the activity went, and how they dealt with the late-arriving news items.
• This activity could be varied by providing different groups with a different political, religious or other point of view to represent, asking them to produce their news bulletins accordingly.

• Replay the broadcasts, analysing them in the same way that the 'real' broadcasts were analysed in the first section of the unit.
• The groups/chief editors explain why they chose the stories they did, and why particular stories/items were rejected. They consider how editing a story can change its impact. If appropriate, they discuss the sources of the stories.
• Drawing on their experiences in this unit, pupils reflect on the rights of the free press and the role and responsibilities of the media in providing information to the public within a democratic framework that protects the rights of individuals. They identify ways in which they can apply what they have learned to their own work in school or elsewhere.