 Schools: Classroom Broadcasts
For schools, community radio is a
great teaching tool right across the
curriculum and it's also a way of
giving a platform to school activity for
the public as a whole," says Radio Regen
Director Phil Korbel.
Radio Regen has sought to get local
schools formally on board wherever they
broadcast, recognising their integral role
in communities. This has not only proved
beneficial to pupils and teachers but has
also increased listenership.
In each case, the first step is to make
contact with school heads and key
teachers, explains ALL FM Community
Participation Officer David Armes. During
2003, he worked intensively with
Levenshulme High School and St Luke's
Primary School and has now formed links
with six schools.
Typically four schoolchildren come in
to present a 10-minute slot either weekly
or fortnightly, that they have prepared
with the help of teachers. "They want to
talk about their school, their teachers,
hobbies, friends, films, music, brothers
and sisters. Without prompting from the
teachers, some even want to talk about
their classes at school, homework, sports
days and concerts," David says.
Some schools, such as Ardwick's
Medlock Primary, choose instead to do
one-off broadcasts by incorporating audio
elements into existing class-work. As part
of a project on war, they listened to
Gustav Holst's Mars, read war poetry and
turned it into a 10-minute radio feature.
Three flexible workshops have been
designed to get kids from the classroom
to the airwaves. The first introduces
community radio and gets them to
brainstorm about what they'd talk about
given ten minutes on air. "I get them to
use their voices and make different vocal
sounds to teach them about the organs
of speech," David says. "That's a really
good ice breaker - it gets them noisy
and talking to each other."
 The second workshop gets down to
the nitty-gritty of how you make a radio
show - introducing concepts of running
orders, scripting, cues and links. At this
point the class gets to play around,
recording on mini-discs.
"You can see it click - the exact
moment they 'get it' and know what they
want to do is when they first hear their
voice back and it all makes sense. Before
that saying 'write a script, do a running
order' seems a bit abstract and boring."
The third workshop finalises the
scripts they'll actually use on their first
micro-show - they make test recordings,
listen back and give each other feedback.
"I try and speak as little as possible and
let them join the dots - the whole point
is that it's their radio station."
"Their first response is 'brilliant, we're
gonna be on the radio!' Straight away
they're bright-eyed and excited. The
beauty of radio is it's a 'cool thing'; it's not
like telling them that they've got to write
a speech."
Teachers seem happy too as it can
be incorporated into diverse areas of the National Curriculum from English and
Media Studies to IT and Music. "Primary
schools can make it part of lessons on
speaking and listening, citizenship,
personal and social education, and
engaging with the wider community."
The motivation of classes is often so
high it doesn't generate much extra work
for teachers. "The children decide among
themselves who's doing the slot that
week. They talk about it in breaks and then
go home and write it. All the teacher has to
do is bring them together and finalise it."
And according to Community
Participation Manager Cath Bates, involving
schools has even boosted the number of
listeners at both WFM and ALL FM. "If we
have a school involved which has 600 or
700 kids and a couple come in to do a
show, everything stops in the school while
they're on air. So all those kids are listening,
all their parents, all their relatives - word
spreads and widens the listenership."
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