Reeta Chakrabarti (born 12 December 1964[1]) is currently education correspondent for BBC News.
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Chakrabarti was born in London to an Indian Bengali family and was raised in Birmingham, also having spent time in India as a teenager as a student at the Calcutta International School in Kolkata.[2] She has a degree in English and French from Exeter College, Oxford, where she graduated in 1987, and she also spent a year in France while a student.
In 1994, Chakrabarti became a reporter for the Breakfast Programme on the newly launched BBC Radio Five Live.[3] She later became a general news correspondent working on television as well as radio.
In 1997, she became the BBC Community Affairs correspondent, covering the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and also working on Home Affairs.
In 1999 Chakrabarti secured her role as political correspondent for the BBC, working across a range of programmes in television and radio, reporting on politics for BBC1, BBC2, the BBC News Channel, Radio 4 and Five Live. Currently, as of January 2011 she is the education correspondant for BBC News.
Reeta has also chaired and hosted a number of corporate events, including the 2003 and 2004 Educational Television Awards Dinners for the Royal Television Society.[4]
Chakrabarti is married, lives in North London, and has three children.
Her interests include patronage of the Naz Project, an HIV/AIDS charity focusing on minority groups affected by the disease, and of the National Mentoring Consortium,[5][6] linking ethnic minority undergraduates with employers in the public and private sectors.