We are now delighted to announce the addition of three new PSHE education lesson plans to the suite of free NewsWise teaching materials for primary schools. These latest NewsWise lesson plans are linked to the new statutory Health Education and Relationships Education guidance, and cover:

  • Managing feelings about the news — a lesson that explores the emotional impact of news and gives pupils strategies to manage it
  • Spotting fake news — a lesson to help pupils understand the nature of fake news and its potentially harmful impact on individuals
  • Understanding that news is targeted — a lesson that helps pupils to understand that online information is ranked, selected and targeted and supports them to become critical consumers of such information

NewsWise is also today announcing a series of national festivals to complement the wider roll-out of the programme to schools in 2019/20. These festivals will include family workshops, in-school workshops, journalist visits and teacher training.

These latest developments are timely, with new National Literacy Trust research suggesting that that half of UK parents are worried about the impact of fake news on their children’s lives, and 40% admitting to falling for fake news themselves.

This work builds on a very successful first year for the programme. A year-one evaluation found that children who took part in NewsWise developed a deeper understanding of why and how news stories are created, reported greater confidence when navigating news and showed increased critical engagement with the news. And the programme won a prestigious UNESCO Media Literacy award last month.

Our Chief Executive Jonathan says:
“We are delighted to be part of the NewsWise project as it goes from strength-to-strength, building on the proven impact of year one to ensure more children, and parents, gain the confidence and skills to engage with the news effectively.”

Visit https://www.theguardian.com/newswise for more details of the project and upcoming activities.