If you’ve visited the Philip Lawrence Awards website before, you’ll have noticed that things are looking rather different around here.

Today is a big day. In the plush surroundings of BAFTA we’re not only announcing the news of this year’s brilliant award winners, but also launching PLAnet – a brand new dimension to the Philip Lawrence Awards.

PLAnet is the Philip Lawrence Awards Network. Its aim is to give more young people the chance to get involved, share their work more widely, and to allow people to share ideas and get support in developing their projects that might go on to be future winners. This website is a key part of doing that and gives you the opportunity to create a public profile page for your project, and to have your say in the forum and on this news blog.

You can also interact with us through Twitter and Facebook and over the next few months, look out for more ways to connect.

As part of PLAnet, we’ll continue and develop our work with the fellowship of previous award winners, and our participation team Lisa and Arron have lots of exciting plans for next year. We’ll be calling on the experience, talent and ideas of the fellowship to make this website as useful and interesting for young people as possible, so do keep checking back on the news page to hear about what they get up to.

We’d like to say a very big thank you to the team who have been working very hard behind the scenes to get everything ready in time for launch. We’re pretty pleased with how it looks – and hope you like it too.