Oakham linguists win SCOOP journalism competition

Published by Oakham School on Thursday 26th of March 2015

Oakham School's French team won the SCOOP regional journalism competition, beating six other participating schools. As part of their prize, they will have the opportunity to visit the offices of the Independent in London, to spend the day immersed in the field of journalism and to see the next day's edition roll off the printing press. Our Spanish team were close behind them, receiving recognition for the most original entry.

The SCOOP journalism competition was a day to test the linguistic skills and ability to work as a team for Sixth Form French, Spanish and German students.

The day began with an introductory welcome and opening speech by Simon Hart, journalist for The Independent and UEFA, who enlightened the participants on the field of journalism and how being fluent in languages gives someone that all-important edge over others when competing in the job market. With entertaining anecdotes of his time covering the Brazilian World Cup and plenty of sound advice, Simon set the tone for the day.

The task for the competing teams was to produce an authentic-looking front page of a newspaper supplement, which would also include an advertising spot. Each team designated one of their members as journalist ready at a moment's notice to attend press conferences, which regularly took place during the morning. Another member of the team was responsible for pitching to representatives of leading companies such as Seat, Audi, Zara, L'Oreal and Rolex to sell advertising space in the supplement.

With deadlines to be met at key points during the day, our teams soon got down to the task. The day culminated in a 5 minute presentation in French or Spanish of the each teams' front cover, all before a panel of judges. Our linguists for équipe Française (Millie Deering, George Bagshaw, Ana Gonzalez, Alma Moss Bokare and Jessica Leaf) and Equipo Espa�ol (Tiéphaine Thomason, Sasha Buravsky, Mia Sevlievska, Gaia Trevisiol and Will Guy) were really put through their paces.

The pupils performed superbly in all aspects of the task and really impressed the panel of judges with their front page designs, as well as their confidence, fluency of language and content of presentation.