Welcome to the Shine School Media Awards!
The Shine School Media Awards is a free national competition that rewards a diversity of talent from secondary schools across the UK who work on the writing, editing, design and fund-raising for a school newspaper, magazine or multimedia project such as a podcast or digital publication.
The annual culmination of each year’s Shine Awards is a gala ceremony held in central London every summer with student workshops and incredible guest speakers.
The significant benefits of starting a Shine project include an enrichment of the school curriculum, an incentive to creativity and the chance for pupils to win national recognition and in the process enrich their CV and applications for university or college.
The Shine Awards is an endeavour of The Stationers’ Foundation, the charitable arm of The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, one of the UK’s ancient livery companies.
Latest news
13th January 2026
Ask the winner: Eliza Clark on following your passions and “just going for it”
This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Eliza Clark, winner of the 2022 Terry Mansfield Award CBE prize for Tomorrow’s Talent and Best Magazine for her school magazine, The Beacon.
“Coming back after Covid, we were quite aware we were in quite a historic year,” Eliza explains. “We just wanted it to be something that really brought people together.” The team – about 12 students including four in the core editorial group – decided to focus on what ‘beacon’ really means: “that symbol of light and hope.”
They put their school building on the front cover. “Because we had so many lockdowns and did so much of the work remotely from each other, that made the actual school building itself quite important to us as kind of a lighthouse.”
Our entrants speak...
“Creating a student publication is a wonderful way to involve pupils across a school and enable them to express themselves and be part of a community. It is then even more rewarding to be involved with the Shine Awards which celebrates their success and offers inspirational advice from industry professionals.”
Craig Cole, Head of Graphics, Photography & Printing Reed’s School, Surrey
More feedback from schools