Shine news

This week, ‘Ask the Winner’ features Mabel Lea, winner of the 2023 Editor of the Year award for her school magazine Exia.

Mabel’s story is particularly interesting because she didn’t start from scratch. The magazine was in its second year of existence when she became editor-in-chief.

“The year before, it was being built from nothing, which is an incredible achievement. I wanted to get involved as soon as it became a thing. I did an article and a bit of editing in that first year. I just fell in love with it really. I was so passionate about making something that we as students could express ourselves through in a way that didn’t really exist.”

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Aashi Bains, winner of our ‘student of the year’, the Terry Mansfield Award CBE prize for Tomorrow’s Talent a well as leading the editorial team to wins for Best Magazine, Best Front Cover and Best Printed Publication for The Beacon.

Aashi had been obsessed with working on her school magazine since she was 11 years old.

“I think from a very young age, I was very interested in journalism. I would email any paper, try and just basically write anything. Within my secondary school in Birmingham, there’s an annual school magazine and it’s a pretty big deal. We get this massive notice board in the hall, the editor-in-chief gets her own little picture. I think since joining that school when I was 11, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to be that.’”

Five years later, Aashi got her wish. Here’s her story.

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.”

This week sees the beginning of ‘Ask the Winner,’ a new original Shine podcast series we hope supports and inspires your students to create great school media.

Each week I will be interviewing previous Shine winners as they tell us what went into the making of their project and how it became successful.

This week, Maxi Jen, the winner of the 2025 Terry Mansfield Award CBE prize for Tomorrow’s Talent shares how his school magazine The Scientific Latimerian went from a folder of Google Docs to an award-winning magazine.

It’s almost the end of term and we know it’s been a really busy one, so we’d like to wish everyone a great break and a special and happy time for those celebrating the season.

As the year draws to a close, I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who’s got involved in the Shine School Media Awards in 2025. Chairing the awards is an incredible experience and means I meet some amazing students and teachers in the course of the year. The ingenuity, creativity, thoughtfulness and sense of humour and fun I find again and again in the students that enter the competition is inspiring and genuinely uplifting.

Chances are your students are already creating great media.

Is it the genesis of a school magazine built from writing they’re doing as part of the curriculum? Are they making docu-video at home which they’re talking about putting on TikTok? Is someone recording a podcast episode the class reckons is worthy of Spotify? Inevitably it’s work that’s exciting, evolving or experimental. Something that I hear about happening at secondary schools across the UK every term.