Providing meaningful programmes for our Transition Year (TY) students is an important aspect of programme provision in our schools. Learning new skills is one way to achieve this and a fantastic example of this has been taking place in Moville Community College over the last six years through the Newsbrands Ireland PressPass TY programme. In this blog, our Moville Community College English teacher and (Press Pass Coordinator) Anne Browne tells us more about what is now an award-winning programme for them.
I have taught the PressPass TY news literacy programme for six years. This programme culminates in a competition at the end of a module which is circulated to participating schools in January each year. In this time, we have received a total of thirteen awards. The first one was in 2018 when Eoin O Doherty won second prize for his sports article about a home team derby match against Lifford in a thrilling ten-goal Junior Cup final. His success, combined with my natural interest in journalism, inspired me to continue with the programme, which I feel is of huge benefit to all my students, not just the individual and group winners.
In 2019 a student of mine, Jessica Moir, was recovering from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and she wrote about the experience. Her eye-opening article won first place in the Features category, which is the most competitive one in the competition. This student subsequently went on to study Journalism at third level in Scotland.
In 2020 we had two winners: Peter Grant won the Sports category with his account of a riveting club hurling final in Tipperary called “Winner Wonderland”, featuring an epic battle between Borrisoleigh and Kiladangan. Nathan Connolly also won third place in the Features category for his personal story, “Transitioning”.
In 2021 Molly Kay won first place for her news story about a Global Development Education (GDE) themed collaboration between Moville Community College and St Francis National School in Clonmany. There was, unfortunately, no face-to-face award ceremony that year due to covid 19.
Last year (2023) we entered a full newspaper for the very first time called TY Times and we not only won this category but also won the entire competition. There were some celebrations in Moville that night! There were three other individual winners too: Erin Leech came third in the sports category for her insightful article called “A Captain Speaks”. Noah Cavanagh came second for his feature on ADHD. Jara Schauffler, an Austrian exchange student, also came second in the opinion section for her GDE-themed opinion piece called “ We Have to Stick Together”.
This year (2024) we came home with a further three awards: Philip Walker won the Sports category for his article “Karate King”, TY Times 2024 came second place in the Newspaper category and Áine de Courcey came third for her Sports article “Teenage Kicks”.
The success of our school in this TY initiative has been quite unprecedented. I have never really considered what makes a successful student newspaper until this moment but I think I can explain how we may have stumbled upon a winning formula. The newspaper team was appointed at the start of the year. The team consisted of five eager volunteers and together they gathered photos, match reports, interviewed guests and kept their ears to the ground all year long. This year my TY team also worked on our monthly newsletters so when they started to work on their competition entry, they had already gathered quite a bit of experience in the use of Canva design and developed news writing skills.
We used a Canva template and customised it to our specifications. Each student was assigned a specific role within the team, one student gathered news, one looked after photos, advertisements and design, one was in charge of sport, one opinion and the final one decided which news items could be developed into features.
I set news writing assignments for the whole class and these also fed the newspaper. We asked the class to write letters to the editor, these became our opinion pieces along with the ETB Ethos Week debate speeches, which were reshaped by the team into opinion articles. We wanted to report school news and community news so we reported on the Adopt a Monument Scheme, Wild Ireland’s recent rare Barbery monkey birth and the Donkey Sanctuary fundraising campaign. Evan Logan of Northwest Newspix kindly gave us unpublished photos of both to include in our newspaper. Donal Kearney also gave us permission to use his green, white and gold Crana Bridge image in our photojournalism page.
We used the ETB Core Values of Respect, Equality, Care, Community, Excellence in Education to guide us in the production of our newspaper and we themed each page accordingly. We Featured Junk Kouture, The Mullan Hope Centre, TY trips to Barcelona, Andorra and Derry, Seachtain na Gaeilge, student Awards, LGBTQI+ Quality Mark, Ethos Week, Forensic workshops, Multicultural Mural, Christmas Giving, MCC New Building, Fairtrade, Changemakers, TY Team bonding and a piece about a beloved Sixth Year student Thomas Gallagher who died tragically in a road traffic accident during the Halloween mid-term break.
We had to be careful not to breach copyright with our choice of images, as this can lead to disqualification, but we were permitted to use flyers, which we then tried to match to the theme of each page. Producing a newspaper is a lot of work, but the students just loved the experience and of course they got some time out of class too, which for them was quite a bonus! Overall developing a school newspaper is a brilliant opportunity for students to work as part of a team and create something really special of which they can be very proud.
Last year our newspaper was an experiment, this year we fine-tuned it, next year if we can gather a team of TY volunteers, we might just give it another go!
If you would like to read some of our previous winners then you can access them at: https://presspass.ie/