Tag: Leadership

Better Schools for Birmingham? A new podcast on the Grassroots Channel

Naseem Akhtar is angry – quietly, productively, but all the same angry. She believes the families of Birmingham deserve better schools, schools which have greater aspirations for their pupils, schools which aim to do more than achieve an average outcome for children.

Last month she launched a city wide campaign on the quality of education in Birmingham. She wants to apply pressure from parents and professionals to help teachers, heads, school governors and politicians raise their game.

To find out more about Naseem and what motivates here, listen to the latest programme from the Grassroots Channel. Use the link to download notes from the launch of campaign group which set out problems and potential solutions.

 

Refucast – the podcast for refugees – new on the Grassroots Channel

Mikko Kapanen and Shauna Magunda are two students at UCE in Birmingham who used their final year project to experiment with podcasting to tell the stories of refugees in the city. This programme talks to them about how and why they did it and also hears excerpts from some of the remarkable people who spoke to Shauna and made it onto Refucast.

Talk like a Brummie day

image from peteashton

Jon Bounds – the man behind BiNS, the chap who put this site together and the bloke I worked with (he did it mostly) on upyerbrum, continue his one man online campaign to show the true strength of this fabulous city.

He has declared July 20th 2007 Talk Like a Brummie Day.

Orlroit bab!
How often do we hear or read this on a slow news day? “The Brummie accent has been named the least intelligent” “least trustworthy” “least friendly” “most dishonest”? When the media needs a quick stupid stereotype what sort of voice do they pick?

Well us moaning isn’t going to change anything – let’s face it we’re bloody good at whinging and it hasn’t worked yet – so we should celebrate our accent and dialect and encourage everyone to ‘Talk Like a Brummie’ for one day. Come on everyone, don’t gerra cobb on, we ain’t yampy.

We’ll be celebrating, no matter how dark it gets over Bill’s mothers.

Of course this has to be a global collaboration – fluent speakers can add to the brummie dictionary, whilst anyone can vote for this on upyerbum, add the date to their diary, pop this countdown to the day on their site, practice from the dictionary and remember that July 20th is a day of solidarity – a day to talk like a brummie. of course their more besides – perhaps someone fancies doing a youtube guide – and maybe I should get round to a podcast.