ABP Angus Youth Get Social!

Our 2022 finalists got together as a group for the first time recently. They attended a live workshop on how to use social media. Cool FM / Downtown Radio presenters Rebecca McKinney and Caroline Fleck shared the secrets of their success.

 As well as being a co-presenter of Cool FM’s breakfast show, Rebecca is also a successful fashion stylist and Instagram influencer. Caroline Fleck hosts her own show on Downtown Radio. The pupils were able to find out how Caroline and Rebecca create and manage good quality media content to have impact and create engagement with the target audiences for their projects.

They also got to create their own piece of video content with help and feedback from the trainers.  The event was kindly hosted at CAFRE Loughry Campus.  

From left, Rebecca McKinney Presenter Cool FM, with Victoria Currie Dalriada School, Nathan Blair Cookstown High School, Eva Furphy St Catherine’s College Armagh, John Mark McCrea Cookstown High School, Ellen Bailie Newtownhamilton High School, and Caroline Fleck, Presenter Downtown Radio at CAFRE Loughry Campus during the media workshop organised for the 2022 ABP Angus Youth Challenge finalists by ABP and the Angus Producer Group.

Winter Class of 2021 Finalists Announced

Teams from Banbridge Academy; Cookstown High; Newtownhamilton College and St. Catherine’s College, Armagh have been selected as 2021 Winter finalists in the ABP Angus Youth Challenge. They were presented with their mini-herds of Angus cross calves in November 2021 as part of their reward for becoming finalists. They have also been assigned special projects to research that relate to sustainable Angus beef production.

The team at Banbridge Academy has been given the research theme of ‘Positioning Northern Ireland as a Global Leader in Sustainable Beef Production.’ Cookstown High School will be researching the ‘Features of the Northern Ireland Beef Farmer of the Future.’ Meanwhile Newtownhamilton College have been asked to look at the Younger Consumer and the Factors that Influence their Choices in Eating Beef. The pupils from St Catherine’s College will be looking at the connectivity between animals, people, plants and the environment in a project entitled ‘One Health.’

To reach the ‘final four’, they had to compete against 18 other teams which included taking part in an exhibition, judged by an independent panel of industry and education experts.

They join four other schools, who are already in the finalist programme. This group received their calves back in the summer of 2021. They are St. Kevin’s Lisnaskea; Dalriada School Ballymoney; Cookstown High School and Friends’ School, Lisburn.

The Summer and Winter teams will now compete in their own cohorts but complete their finalist programmes concurrently at the end of 2022.

Isabella Macari with the calves she and her team at St. Catherine’s College Armagh have won as part of becoming Winter 2021 Finalists in the ABP Angus Youth Challenge.