Mrs Rink’s nomination for Kateryna Barabash for a Shine (National) Media Award 2017
I am nominating Kateryna Barabash (Y13) as the most inspirational pupil. She took on the challenge of editing and producing Adcotians – our school newspaper – in January 2016 with no input from staff.
She brought together girls aged nine to 20-years-old and ten different nationalities: Ukrainian, Chinese, Polish, Nigerian, Moldovan, British, Belorussian, Russian, Indian and Turkish.
Kate, who comes from the Ukraine, arranged a weekly editorial conference, involving Lower School girls and Upper School.
This encouraged non native speakers, of all ages, to communicate more effectively in English and built their confidence, as they learned to see themselves as meaningful participators in British society.
Kate was a formidably well-organised and inspirational leader. She developed a schedule and handed out worksheets for planning and submitting articles. Kate also consistently drove up standards, producing a questionnaire to encourage suggestions for improvements. She sourced software for design herself, using Apple Pages. The progression from a scrappy new sheet to a beautiful and popular school newspaper was astonishing.
Kate clearly takes great pride in everything she does, but she was also selfless about allocating tasks and did not keep the best interviews for herself.
She was brilliant at assessing individual skills and allocating roles and assignments accordingly.
Through her own, unwavering enthusiasm for journalism, Kate also inspired the girls to work hard, to commit to the project and take pride in it and to submit articles to deadlines.
Categories: Achievement