MY TY WEEK:Helen Ryan (15), St Mary's Girls School, New Ross, Co Wexford

‘Our main focus at the moment is the Young Social Innovators competition. Our project, “Beauty is the Beast”, is all about self-image and how young people perceive themselves. Girls are constantly bombarded with media and peer pressure. We see size zero models, airbrushed photos, and people in magazines looking perfect. This makes us feel we need to look a certain way to be acceptable.

“Our group carried out surveys amongst boys and girls. What we found was that boys are also affected by this pressure, although they’re not as vocal about it. They tended to be more concerned about the size of their muscles, and there was also some pressure to be good at sport.

“We’ve had a speaker from Bodywhys [the Eating Disorder Association of Ireland] out to school and we’ve raised €200 through a cake sale. For our Speak Out event, we did a mock beauty pageant presentation. Different girls played different roles, including Miss Insecure and the only person who was true to herself, Miss Real.

“Our topic is an issue that affects most people in some way. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve made a lot of good friends through this. All 24 in our class are taking part in some way, while the other TY class is doing a project on FairTrade.

“There’s so much more in TY: this week we went to the Lions Club in New Ross, we’ve been teaching volleyball to local primary schools, and we’ve had guests in to run poetry and samba workshops.”