Impact

We’re proud to reach so many teachers and children globally, but we know that it’s regular Topical Talk use that helps students to make accelerated progress in essential skills and to develop a broad knowledge of current affairs.

This is why we track how often children engage with Topical Talk. Teachers are categorised based on how often they download lessons. This helps us determine if children are engaging infrequently, regularly over a short-term period or regularly over a long-term period.

Headlines are the core Topical Talk offering. Every week, a stand-alone lesson about a topic in the news is published and made freely available to teachers who have a Topical Talk account.

The lessons combine the pedagogical expertise of The Economist Educational Foundation’s teachers with the journalistic expertise of The Economist. This means that every lesson has content that teachers can trust and interactive activities that make children think hard and communicate effectively about the topic.

Topical Talk builds knowledge about the news and develops four essential skills: speaking, listening, problem-solving and creativity.

We use the Skills Builder Universal Framework to measure this. We support teachers to assess their class prior to using Topical Talk and after using Topical Talk regularly for at least six weeks.

Topical Talk Festivals offer school children the opportunity to connect online with peers across the world, engage with leading professionals and topic experts and gain recognition for their school on a global stage.

The Topical Talk Festival 2024 ran for 10 weeks between January and March.

To get a feel for the discussions, download the latest Festival Hub Highlights magazine:

Topical Talk Communities are where our most in-depth work happens.

In Topical Talk Communities we provide teacher training, implementation support and impact evaluation. We celebrate teachers’ and students’ achievements to help make Topical Talk inspiring and valued.

We work collaboratively with teachers in local clusters of schools to make Topical Talk a long-term success in their communities. Our goal is to support the teachers to run regular Topical Talk discussions on an ongoing basis for the deepest impact on students.