IT’S A WRAP
Rawmarsh School in Rotherham is most famous for the “chips through the fence” saga, when parents refused to take advice from TV chef Jamie Oliver and allegedly passed chips and burgers through for their children’s lunch instead.
After all the criticism about not promoting a healthy lifestyle, it seems somewhat ironic that the school has just launched a set of curriculum resources for primary PE teachers.
The teachers started researching material about five years ago, “long before Jamie came to the school”, according to Jane Littlewood, marketing and design manager of the resources.
The teachers felt that they didn’t get enough PE-related teacher training, and after Ofsted judged that pupils found the transition to secondary school PE difficult, they took matters into their own hands.
The school promotes active playgrounds and runs the school sports partnership for the Rotherham area. But why was there such a resistance to Jamie’s healthy food?
“I suppose it’s a constant battle against today’s youth,” says Jane. “What they see on TV is what they want to eat. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Lesson learned, Jamie.
www.pe-resources.co.uk
PORN IN THE USA
Texting photographs of your private parts may be what passes for flirting among today’s teenagers, but it could also see them classed as sex offenders. High school pupils in the United States are facing charges of obscenity and child pornography after they were allegedly caught on camera.
Prosecutors have decided to clamp down on intimate self-portraits - “sexting” by mobile phone - sent between pupils. And it’s not just the senders who are being targeted: teenagers who fail to delete them could end up in court.
In one case in Indiana, a teenage boy has been charged with obscenity for allegedly sending pictures of his genitals to female classmates. In Pennsylvania, three girls who sent saucy pictures and the four boys who received them were all charged with child pornography. All but one accepted a lesser charge to avoid a trial. And in Ohio, a 15-year-old girl agreed to give up her mobile phone in exchange for child pornography charges being dropped.
The cases have prompted accusations that it is heavy-handed to treat the teenagers as sex offenders, when all they were doing was the updated equivalent of passing drawings around the class. It remains to be seen how police would handle the identity parade.
