Body image and gender stereotyping are topics which receive quite a lot of coverage on Newsround. Here, for instance, Newsround reported on what boys and girls prefer to be when they grow up.

And in this report Natasha Devon talks to Ricky about the importance of self-esteem.

Those topics are also central to some of CBBC's My Life series of documentaries :

"I Am Leo" featured Leo, who was born a female called Lily, but who wants to be recognised as a boy in society. Leo hated looking like a girl.

10-year-old Kai is a friend of Leo's, and they play football together.

Leo: The only difference between our life and er ..

Kai: .. a boy's life

Leo: .. yeah, a born-male boy's life, is we're trapped in this awful body and we have to do loads of medical stuff.

"What's a Girl?" followed Shelby on her quest to find out what it is exactly that makes a girl a girl. Shelby, too, doesn't conform with many people's idea of a typical girl but, unlike Leo, Shelby is happy to have been born female.

Shelby: I'm a girl. But some people think I that I want to be a boy because of the way that I look. I'm really happy being a girl and my life is pretty normal. ... I like being who I am. I wouldn't change it for anything.

Shelby visits a primary school where she finds out how young children respond to gender stereotypes - for example, hair length and clothing. As an experiment the children were asked to dress up in their own choice of costume.

Although CBBC documentaries have covered children growing with in a wide range of situations, we've yet to see a programme about being lesbian, gay or bisexual. However being gay was mentioned briefly as part of an episode of Our School, broadcast last November.

LGBT History Month starts this Sunday.

If you want news about the BBC, you'd think their press office would be a good place to start looking. And, in fact, that was true until a few years ago. But things got much worse with the launch of a new-look press office, now re-named as BBC Media Centre. The new resource is only a shadow of its former self. Many pre-2011 archived pages have been removed completely, and the keyword archive search engine no longer works.

So much for the BBC Trust promise, in 2010, to set new standards of openness and transparency.

The report below was from Broadcast on 16th January 2015 -

Wizards vs Aliens on hold

The BBC has put Wizards vs Aliens on hold after three series due to cost issues regarding the children’s sci-fi drama.

Russell T Davies, who created the show with Phil Ford, said the BBC had “paused but not axed” the CBBC show after three series, because “there was not enough money” as yet to fund further episodes.

He also expressed his concern that protracted talks could result in cast members accepting offers to appear in other shows.

The BBC Wales/FremantleMedia Enterprises series originally received a two-series order totalling 26 episodes. Last year, it returned for a ten-part run under Ford’s sole stewardship.

Two films about important British scientists received nominations for this year's Oscars. But despite the importance of science and computing, neither of the films - The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything - was mentioned in Newsround's report of the nominations. The films are loosely based on the lives of Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking respectively.

CBBC's Absolute Genius series hasn't, as yet, included a programme about Stephen Hawking.

    Imitation Game     /     Theory of Everything

One of this afternoon's questions to the prime minister appears to confirm suspicions that Lord Hall is reluctant to appear in public, and is not up to the job.

Roger Gale MP: Mr Speaker, yesterday the former prime minister, Mr Blair, had to be summoned to the select committee to reluctantly give evidence. We now understand that the director general of the BBC, Lord Hall, is refusing to give evidence to another select committee on the grounds that he's a Member of Parliament. He's also a paid public servant. Isn't it time that we reviewed the matter of parliamentary privilege in this place?



Lord Hall: ".. we should explain ourselves" (November 2013)

LGBT History Month is an excellent opportunity for CBBC Newsround to carry a presspack-style report along similar lines to this Black History Month report by 12-year-old Nyah. Newsround will have to get a move on, though, because LGBT History Month is February - and that's less than a month away.

Happy New Year