10th November - Back to school

Trying to get in touch with schools

Now the school I had in mind was a primary school that attended and left in 2002. Now I thought being a former pupil this school may allow my group to go in and speak to the current pupils. The problem I 1^st noticed was that most of the teachers I had during my time there have moved on to different schools or have retired.  The remaining members of staff that knew who I was asked, asked me to go through the official approach and email the school.  This was the 1^st draft of that email

Hi we are a group of Media students from Liverpool john moores university. As an assignment we have been asked by the games company rebel play to find out why girls don’t play console games. We have some hypothesis on why this is we feel the best way to research these ideas is to start by interviewing pupils at the age of 11 because we believe this is when girls turn away from console games and when boys start to become a part of the gaming culture. We are hoping that you would allow us to come into your school and speak to your year 6 pupils. Give them a small presentation then have them precipitate in activities which we will have prepared so ultimately using that data we can either prove or disprove of hypothesis    

Now after speaking to my fellow team members we edited that email slightly to make it sound more official and less informal. But the result was no response when I spoke to a former teacher they told me that no matter how many times I emailed them the likelihood of the school letting us speak to the year 6 was rare. As the year 6s are seen as the most important year group in the school and that we were more likely to be able to speak to a year 7 class in a secondary school.

This was going to be my next approach anyway as the plan was to try and speak to both. For the approach to speak to a secondary school I went through a specific teacher as I knew it was more likely that he would allow me to speak to his year 7 students even if it was in exchange for me speaking to his year 11 and 6^th form students about university and the course I do. Now the 1^st question he raised was are me and the members of my group CRB checked. The teacher stated he couldn’t let us in to speak if we weren’t.  The answer being I’m not and neither is one of the other members of the group but one of is which gave us chance because that meant that even if one member couldn’t go one could and that we were going to find a loop hole on how to allow me into school that in all likelihood being the fact my younger brother still attends the 6^th form.  After this discussion the teacher told us that he is going to what he can do and try and get us into the school well just have to wait for him to get back to us.