Olympic Dreams School Search - Behind the Scenes
A welcome to the blog from World Class Virginia
Before World Class Grant takes you behind the scenes of our UK competition Olympic Dreams School Search I’m going to let you know what we are doing, and what you can expect from this blog up to 2012.
World Class is a BBC partnership with organisations which help schools to twin. We work with dozens of organisations and the whole project is a public value partnership with the British Council.
Our job is to tell the story and inspire more schools to get involved. We want schools to ‘twin for 2012’ as a legacy project for the BBC’s work on London 2012. And in this blog you can follow our progress and tell us what you think!
So, how do you connect schools with the Olympic Games?
Set aside the Olympic buzz pretty much everyone shares. Some schools have a special reason to get excited by 2012 - the schools attended by athletes, where the dreams began.
Usain Bolt’s former teacher at William Knibb Memorial High in Jamaica understands what makes an Olympic champ tick. "It’s about being the best. It’s a desire thing."
Webster Thompson was talking to Nick Davies and Kevin Bishop, from the BBC’s World Olympic Dreams team, when they filmed at the school earlier this year.
Usain Bolt's old running track at William Knibb Memorial High
It was one of the first films which brought together the BBC’s school twinning project World Class and World Olympic Dreams.
Since then we have teamed up to bring to life a 2012 project based on the inspiration athletes offer to young people everywhere and a conversation between schools around the world.
Over to Grant:
Olympic Dreams School Search - Behind the Scenes
After joining the World Class team in April, Emma and I (Assistant Producers) were given the task of finding all the World Olympic Dreams athletes' schools and telling them about our Olympic Dream: To twin World Olympic Dreams athletes' schools with schools across the UK.
The aim was to create a global network of around 100 schools, who could share inspiration up to London 2012. The partnerships start at one huge event in London in January next year.
Both the BBC and the British Council have networks around the world. Hundreds of emails, phone and video interviews later, and we had spoken to over 50 schools, from 23 countries, across 6 continents. Antarctica eluding us.
To hear how each school had inspired great Olympians and upcoming athletes was inspiring for us to uncover. More than that, we saw how exciting it would be for the athletes’ schools to share their stories, and for UK schools to connect with their counterparts across the globe.
The search to find our UK schools began with BBC Sport presenter Jake Humphrey explaining the ins and outs of the competition.
In September, BBC Breakfast's Kate Silverton and four times Olymic gold medal-winning rower Matthew Pinsent officially launched the search live (Kate taking the ‘launch’ part literally). More than one thousand British schools signed up.
Two months later, we had received hundreds of dreams from British pupils. It was up to Matthew Pinsent, Virginia from the World Class team and Vicky from the British Council to choose the winning schools. Some tough decisions - as Matthew’s fingernails will prove.
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Finding the international schools alone seemed to be a huge task, so to think that just a few months later we’d be revealing the winning UK schools live on BBC Breakfast felt like winning twinning gold.
The result was exactly what we had hoped for and we can’t wait to see the World Class dream realised as the schools meet in London in January.
