Part of what we do at Penny Post is offer work experience to local sixth formers and college students who are interested in media and journalism. In total, we’ve had about fifteen such people, in singly or in pairs, over the last four or five years.

You hear stories of young people who turn up at an office on a Monday morning for their work experience, full of an enthusiasm which tends to wane when they’re not given anything to do beyond making tea. It’s not like that here. We make it clear we have a schedule, including a weekly newsletter, into which they must fit. We also break two pieces of news which sometimes causes initial alarm. The first is that, on Friday morning, they’ll be taking part in the show we do on 4LEGS Radio. The second is that they will, with our help, be writing two articles.

The first, a day-by-day diary of what they’ve done, is quite undemanding. More daunting is to research and write a piece about something, local or otherwise, that interests them. To their credit, despite some initial misgivings, every one of them has risen to the challenge. Topics covered to date include the modern pentathalon, the Lambourn Valley Railway, swimming, blood donation, the demise of the airplane at the Grove Industrial Park, congenital cytomegalovirus (no, we hadn’t heard of it either), marathon running and the enduring appeal of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You can see all the articles and diaries in this section of our website.

Our most recent students were from Newbury College. Truman Newcombe elected to write about the musician Grace Petrie whom he’d recently seen play live. Tyler Moody also chose a matter close to his heart, the very different issue of speeding in Compton.

As I happened, Brian knows quite a few people who’re involved in this issue, so helped Tyler make some calls. By the end, they had a lot of information, and more coming in. The whole point of the exercise was to have something mainly written by the student. By Wednesday, however, we realised that showing him how to organise all this material into a coherent article was going to take more time than we had available. The results, which you can read here, was more of a summary of the main issues, coupled with the frank admission that the subject was just too complex to cover from scratch in a couple of days.

It was a learning experience for all of us. Tyler learned how to conduct an interview and that some topics have many moving parts and it takes time, skill and experience to assemble them in a way that works. It was, for Brian, a reminder that things that you do regularly and effortlessly are hard to deconstruct and explain to someone new to the game. Anyone who’s ever taught their child to drive a car will relate. For all of us, it showed how difficult the problem of speeding is to fix: but, whether by addressing it or just writing about, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try…

The Educafe Experience

Another aspect of work experience we usually offer students is a day at Educafe in Newbury Library on a Wednesday, interviewing the organisers and visitors to this unique community group.

“We love collaborating with Penny Post,” explained Clare Middleton, one of Educafe’s founders who used to run the Berkshire School of English. “We’re both about community and any interviews and articles Penny does here helps communicate to the wider world what Educafe is all about.