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Our impact

2023/24 academic year

Our secondary and higher education team runs free, inspirational news and media workshops. During the 2023-24 academic year they continued to empower young people across the UK to access, understand, participate in and critically analyse media by extending their programme of workshops delivered at our Education Centre, virtually as well as in schools through our Media Literacy Ambassador project.

With this innovative approach, the team has significantly strengthened the reach and effectiveness of our news and media literacy programme.
In numbers
6,956
young people took part in our workshops
437
teachers and educators participated in our workshops and webinars
145
sessions were delivered consisting of school workshops, teacher training and Q&A sessions for higher education groups
161,060
young people, teachers and adults have taken part in our activities since the Education Centre opened in 2002
Extending our reach
In addition to workshops at the Education Centre in London, our virtual sessions and Media Literacy Ambassador outreach project have helped in removing geographical constraints and has enabled us to extend our reach and impact with young people from diverse and underrepresented communities across the UK. We're ambitious to widen our reach further in 2024/25.
Our Media literacy ambassador programme has been training young people in years 9-13 in the Midlands, Greater Manchester and South and West Yorkshire to teach their peers about fake news, enhancing media literacy skills across year groups and subjects.
What secondary school and college teachers say
98%
rated the sessions as excellent or very good (93% excellent/5% very good)
95%
said that students had developed research and questioning skills for checking news and media stories after taking part in the Media Literacy Ambassador programme
94%
said students had increased awareness of journalism and media roles after participating in News editing, Feature and Opinion writing, and Future of news workshops
97%
agreed taking part in a workshop gave them resources and ideas to support their teaching
Impact on young people
84%
of students felt they were more engaged with news after taking part in an Education Centre workshop, compared to 57% before
87%
of young people felt they had a better understanding of careers in media after taking part in an Education Centre workshop compared to 46% before
Young people intending to fact-check media sources almost
tripled
increasing from 23.7% to 74.6% after taking part in our Media Literacy Ambassador programme
Young people's understanding of writing and editing a news article
doubled
increasing from 40% to 91% after taking part in an Education Centre workshop
The programme engages young people in media in an enjoyable and realistic way. They can then hold that experience in their heads when back in the classroom and this benefits teachers to teach how media works in the real world rather than it being really abstract and not related to them.
Teacher
George Monoux College
One thing I liked about the workshop is that we were all productive whilst having fun. We completed our paper and made the most out of this experience with joy.
Student
Forest Gate School, London
This programme has been so well received by students. They feel privileged to be a part of it and the staff have loved it too! It’s directly relevant to everything the students do. We’re just mapping out a curriculum for next year, and we intend to integrate research methods based on this project into subjects, because we think it’s brilliant.
Teacher
Derby College

Our workshops for schools and colleges

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Registered charity: 1153865