Alsop students take over Educate HQ

A group of students from Alsop High School had the opportunity to visit Educate HQ and learn about the process of how a real magazine is made. The students were given a task, to take part in a debate and report on how it took place, before turning all their hard work into a feature fit for the magazine.

Here is Gareth and Melissa’s account of the day.

Our day in the office

Hi, we are Gareth Ball and Melissa Sefton from Alsop High School and today we came into the Educate office to learn how to piece together a magazine properly. We started out as a small group in our school who all agreed to contribute to a small magazine, which would be distributed around the school so everyone can read it and be up to date.

We arrived on the 15 May and had a tour of the publishing house. We met the sales team, editors, designers, public relations officers, and the journalists. After that we went down into the light, open basement where we were placed into different roles. We all had a role to play: we were debaters alongside Daisy Leavesley and Jake Lewis. Kane Reed and Emily Schofield were the PR officers and responsible for the Educate Magazine Twitter account, Nayri Alsaadoon and Louie Abrussa were the photographers, Paris O’Connell and Abbie Chadwick were the journalists. The debate was about whether or not 16-17 year olds should vote in the General Election.

On the proposition we had Daisy and Jake who fought an amazing argument against the opposition, which was us. The questions asked included “16 and 17 year olds can vote in other European countries, such as Germany and Norway, why shouldn’t the UK follow suit?” The responses made to this were “Are they ready?”, “The UK may be behind, they may not be as responsible as other countries”, and the opposition said: “Why can’t we be different”.

The next question brought forward was, “At the Scottish referendum last year, 16-17 year olds were allowed to vote and over 100,000 did vote. Isn’t this proof that young people are engaged in politics?”

The proposition said: “This is proof that young people are interested in politics.”

We answered the question saying: “With rights come responsibilities, 16 and 17-year-olds have their whole lives to be politically responsible – leave voting to the adults.”

To conclude, do you agree with us? Would you lower the age of voting? What would your responses be to theses questions if you were in our position? Lastly, we would like to thank all the staff at the publishing house.

BYE!