An interactive media agency is going to help schoolchildren become good citizens.

Worth Media from Brighton, which specialises in education and health, has won the contract to design 21st Century Citizen, an online resource for citizenship at key stages 3 and 4 (11 to 16-year-olds).

The web site will be launched at BETT, the education technology show at Olympia, London, in January 2003.

21st Century Citizen is being developed by the British Library in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Public Record Office (PRO), with financial support from the Treasury's Invest to Save Budget (ISB).

The web resource will include text, images, manuscripts, mapping, statistics and sound recordings from the collections of the three partners.

The style of the support materials and activities will encourage an enquiry-based approach to learning and introduce students to evidence they can use to support debates about controversial contemporary issues.

It exploits the breadth of assets available from the three partner organ-isations, offering teachers and students opportunities to use original source material to support teaching and learning in citizenship, which becomes a new statutory area of the national curriculum from September 2002.

The material for one of the enquiries includes reports of children in prison from the Newgate Calendar in the 1820s and held at the British Library.

These reports can be compared with the latest statistics on juvenile crime from the ONS, data from the 2001 census and census data from the 19th Century from the PRO.

The material will be supported by contextual information, narrative, online activities, research ideas and teaching notes.

Mark Ralphs, projects director at Worth Media, said: "The 21st Century Citizen project is a great opportunity to develop a web site that provides a benchmark for the online delivery of exciting educational resources."

www.worthmedia.net
www.bl.uk
www.statistics.gov.uk
www.pro.gov.uk