From Our Home Correspondent 16/02/2020
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the latest programme of the monthly series, Mishal Husain introduces dispatches from journalists and writers around the United Kingdom reflecting the range of contemporary life in the country.
Emma Jane Kirby, in Birmingham, reports on the seeds of magic sown by teachers there in schools serving deprived neighbourhoods - but also on the sometimes shocking realities of daily life at home for a number of the pupils.
In Carmarthenshire, David Baker explores the wide range of renewable energy projects being pioneered locally amidst a rich range of Welsh natural resources - and also witnesses a minor drama on his visit to a wind turbine. But who caused it?
Nearly thirty years after her aunt took her own life after living with depression for decades, Sima Kotecha reflects on daily life for those living with mental illness and those relatives and friends who witness it. She also considers how hard it remains for those in some South Asian communities to open up about their conditions and what the prospects are for that to change.
With buses seemingly now back in political favour across Britain, Christine Finn returns to the Channel Islands to discover how well-connected bus services are on her native Jersey - and embarks on an ambitious journey round the island to find out if she can circumnavigate it entirely on public transport in one day.
And Shaun Ley describes what it was like to be greeted by an unwelcome rodent in his home and the steps taken to deal with the visitor. But why are there seemingly more rats in our midst and why have they become bigger and bolder? The local rat catcher has some thought-provoking ideas...
Producer: Simon Coates
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds. |
| 0:02.0 | Thank you for downloading from our home correspondent on BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Michelle Hussein. |
| 0:08.0 | And this time we have a correspondent creating trouble, |
| 0:11.0 | inadvertently I should say, while visiting a wind turbine in Camarthenshire. |
| 0:16.4 | We have a family story from another, one that goes back nearly 30 years, to a beloved aunt's struggle |
| 0:22.0 | with depression. |
| 0:23.0 | We're on the bus in Jersey, in fact on nearly all its buses, |
| 0:28.0 | to ask whether you can circumnavigate the island that way. |
| 0:32.0 | And a most unwelcome visitor in one BBC presenter's |
| 0:36.5 | kitchen and how he fixed that rat. |
| 0:41.4 | We begin in Birmingham where the world at once Emma Jane Kirby has spent much of the last year |
| 0:46.6 | immersing herself in the lives of some of its children. You might have heard her reports, |
| 0:52.2 | but there is much more that she's seen inside schools that she cannot report and that at times has been profoundly shocking. |
| 1:01.0 | The children at Belfield Junior School don't know it yet, but it's the last time they'll go to the pantomime. |
| 1:08.0 | Nearly two-thirds of the pupils here are classed as disadvantaged, so the school's been heavily subsidising the annual |
| 1:15.2 | outing, including this year's trip to Neverland. |
| 1:19.2 | But with classroom windows that won't shut, scores of children with special educational needs requiring help |
| 1:25.6 | from teaching assistance the school can't afford to employ, plus a crippling pastoral care burden, |
| 1:32.2 | head teacher Nigel Atwood has decided to pull the final curtain. |
| 1:37.3 | He makes the announcement with a dry throat at the Governor's meeting. |
| 1:41.1 | It's heartbreaking, he says, almost wicked to take away this magical experience from children. |
... |
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