For many community workers, teachers and pupils citizenship (and PSHE) are amongst the least enjoyable and sometimes most embarrassing aspects of the curriculum.Small wonder that many a harassed pshe co-ordinator can come to view the job as something akin to a poison chalice. Yet it needn’t be, and indeed it shouldn’t be.

pupiline is dedicated to taking the least enjoyable part of helping young people and making it both informative and fun. Above all the aim is to turn the past on its head and to get young people to become much more involved in this part of their education. This will become increasingly important for the compulsory introduction of citizenship into the curriculum next year, if it is to be attractive to pupils.

The beauty of the site and its feature material is that it is so flexible. It can be used to drive pshe lessons with everyone logged on. It can be used in one to one counselling and individual student research, peer counselling and small group work. It can be used to complement existing syllabus material and Oli believes it will open the doors to more student involvement because it can be used in a way that pupils can work on individually chosen areas of research monitored by their class teacher who becomes a facilitator rather than a lecturer. This so impressed Microsoft that they have included pupiline.net in their list of preferred suppliers of software for the new Encarta Class Server managed learning environment software recently launched onto the market.