Year 7 students impress competition judges with their Census 2021 campaigns

29 April 2021

Congratulations to our Year 7 students Jessica; Leila; Sam; Lara, Emma and Frieda who have been announced as runners-up in the Office for National Statistics (ONS) ‘It’s Our Story’ competition from the Census Secondary Education Programme.

Both teams will now receive certificates and have their work published in the National Archives.

“Our Year 7 students completed a unit on the 2021 Census as part of their Geography course this year,” says their teacher, Dr Cyrus Nayeri . “This included a project-based task to design and create a campaign motivating their local community to take part in Census 2021. The students really enjoyed working on this real-world problem and produced some superb work. Some of it was so good that we submitted it to the ONS competition. We’re so proud of them – not just one but two of our teams’ work was selected as runners-up by the judges.”

Entrants were judged by a panel of experts including Teacher Tapp co-founder and education journalist, Laura McInerney; head of education & outreach at The National Archives, Andrew Payne; ONS deputy director of Communications Karen Campbell-White, EVERFI UK president Nick Fuller MBE and managing director at M&C Saatchi, Tom Firth.

Young people, aged 11-18 years old from more than 2,000 schools and colleges across England and Wales entered the competition to design a campaign to raise awareness about the once-in-a-decade survey among a specific audience via YouTube videos, leaflets, online articles or social media posts. The competition is part of a wider secondary schools’ programme being run by the ONS. Developed by EVERFI UK, it aims to teach students about the importance of the census and how data can benefit their local areas through cross-curricular activities.

To see the entries that Jessica; Leila; Sam; Lara, Emma and Frieda created as well as the other successful submissions, visit: https://census.gov.uk/census-secondary-education-programme