8:24am Sunday 11th May 2008
By Nicola Davies
INSPIRED by the culture of under age drinking in the town, budding film makers at Culcheth High School have scooped a prestigious national award for the second year running.
The group of 10 pupils from years nine and 10 went head to head with 170 other pupils from across the country to vie for a place in the 2008 Panasonic Kid Witness News (KWN) UK National Awards.
The teams had four months to research and produce a four-minute video report on an aspect of global citizenship from the perspective of their community.
The Culcheth High School students fought off competition to win the best citizenship award at a ceremony held last Monday. They drew inspiration for their film from the murder of Garry Newlove, who was beaten to death by a gang of drunken yobs.
Sharen Sullivan, KWN co-ordinator at the school, said: "We have been part of this exciting international programme for the past five years, during which we have gone from strength to strength.
"Last year's team tackled the topic of Cleaning the Streets for which we won both UK and European Awards.
"This year's team continued with the citizenship theme and the students undertook an extremely difficult topic by concentrating on underage drinking with the theme Take Responsibility."
Panasonic KWN is a video and life skills programme offering secondary students in five continents state-of-the-art video production equipment and training for the development of school video news teams at no cost to the schools.
The programme started with two schools in New Jersey in 1989 and has now spread to more than 600 schools in 24 countries.
This year 91 schools took part across Europe including 16 in the UK.
The Culcheth High School students' video will now be extended to a 10-minute version that will be shown at other schools across Warrington.
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