Views & Opinion Authenticity is key Comment by ANDREW TOMLINSON, Head of content and commissioning at BBC Teach
My education journey started off in the north east of England. Both my parents were teachers. My mum was a primary school teacher and music teacher for 40 years. My dad was a history teacher and then a deputy head of various secondary schools. I attended a comprehensive near Middlesbrough. I studied journalism at Sheffield University which led to a role at Leicester News Service writing stories for tabloids. Fortuitously, I happened to work in the same building as Radio Leicester and soon started working at the radio station at the weekends. That led to a move to BBC local radio and then BBC TV. I joined the BBC Education team 11 years ago, I’d been interested in education for a long time and this was a great opportunity to be more directly involved. It’s worth remembering that of the 100 years the BBC has been here, education output has been produced for about 95 of them.
I didn’t have direct personal experience of the education system until nine years ago when my partner and I adopted two kids. How the education system works, the choices you must make, and the digital aspect of education is now much more of a reality. It certainly brought a new dimension into my work.
We launched BBC Teach in 2018 to create a dedicated place where teachers could find video resources which were high quality and that they could trust. Fast forward to 2023. Today, BBC Teach is used by almost half of teachers in the UK and has more than 6,000 video resources for primary and secondary teachers.
BBC Teach provides a gateway into the BBC for teachers. We know the organisation is large and complex. Part of our role is to ensure we are linking to all the education initiaitves that happen across the BBC. The BBC Young Reporter competition, for example, is run by a different part of the BBC and is now open for entries. Our core offering is video resources for teachers to use in the classroom. These are all mapped to the curriculum and overseen by education experts to ensure they meet the needs of teachers. We cover all age groups and subjects. We also produce topical collections of content to key moments in the calendar such as collections for Refugee Week, Black History Month and COP27. With all our videos, our objective is to create content that is going to engage children. We use lots of creative approaches, from animation to live action, graphics and even games to really support teachers in the classroom.
BBC Teach is also home to Live Lessons which are streamed live on BBC Teach and broadcast on CBBC as part of the Bitesize Learning Zone. These interactive programmes feature well-known BBC faces such as Chris Packham and CBBC presenter, Joe Tasker as well as respected experts and young learners. Ahead of the live broadcast,
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we publish a teacher guide and activity sheets so that teachers can make the most of this unique resource. Look out for Science Week and World Book Day live lessons which will be broadcast later this year. And if you miss them, they are all available BBC Teach to use with your class.
BBC Teach also hosts some of the wider campaigns produced by BBC Education such as Moodboosters which launched in November 2022. The campaign is designed to get primary school-aged children moving their bodies and learning about their mental health and wellbeing. The activities have been devised with the help of children’s mental health charity, stormbreak and subject specialists to make physical
movement fun, enjoyable and give a sense of wellbeing. Our output changed significantly during the pandemic. We provided a daily service on air and streamed online to help families and teachers ensure children could keep learning and progressing. We had close contact with teachers throughout the period and got lots of valuable feedback about how we could provide more support. A key thing was making it easier for teachers to find what they want on BBC Teach. As a result, we’ve now reorganised all our content so that it’s broken down into year groups.
As a team, we are also constantly looking at how aspects of the curriculum are changing. If there’s a need for a particular kind of content, and that matches what teachers are telling us as well, then that’s likely to be a driver for us to create new content. There’s a BBC Teach Facebook page which is very active. We want to build it even further into a community of teachers; a place where we can share our resources, talk about their pros and cons and what you want to be brought on to BBC Teach. We’re interested in talking to teachers about what we’re planning to commission and the topics they would find useful. Please do get involved through our Facebook page. We also share our commissioning ideas and requests for feedback via our newsletter and you can sign up to receive these on the website.
Looking ahead we have some exciting projects in development for the summer term and beyond for the new academic year. Some of these are the return of favourites like our next series of Live Lessons in Autumn 2023. There will also be a series about teaching looked-after and adopted children.
It is the aim of every single member of the BBC Teach team to continue the BBC’s legacy of creating brilliant content for teachers. With you by our side, we will endeavour to produce teaching resources that spark a child’s imagination.
March 2023
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