Listen now: Blackfriars, OLSH combine for role model podcast

Who are your role models and why do you look up to them?

That was the question posed to secondary students from Blackfriars and Our Lady of the Sacred Heart (OLSH) College as part of a project between the two schools.

Last term, Blackfriars Year 11s Harry Boyd-Turner and Hudson Cosgrove headed to OLSH to record a podcast examining role models and whether gender influenced students’ choices of who they looked up to.

Harry and Hudson, the brains and voices behind Blackfriars’ The Torch podcast, also interviewed several students to discover a little more about who their role models were – and why.

They said many of the survey and interview responses were surprising.

However, both schools’ results showed that role models tended to change as students got older.

“Obviously, there is a big difference between the younger levels and the older year levels, just in the way that they explain their role models,” Hudson said during the recording of the podcast.

He also reflected on some of his own role models over the years: “I remember my first year (at Blackfriars), a Year 12 was a Prefect in my Home Group and I looked up to him. I saw how hard … he worked and to be able to now go, ‘that’s me next year, being in Year 12, I can potentially be a role model for a younger kid’.”

The role model podcast collaboration comes after the two schools’ award-winning 2021 podcast, which discussed the students’ experiences of single-sex education.