Shine news

This week’s Ask the Winner is the last in this season. It’s also a little different! I’m talking to a winning teacher.

George Barrett teaches history at Ermysted’s Grammar School in Skipton and won the 2025 Most Inspirational Teacher award. Seven and a half years ago, he founded The Reason, the school newspaper that’s now produced National Geographic journalists, a Cambridge student newspaper editor and countless writers who learned their craft in his classroom.

His advice for teachers thinking about starting a school publication? “Just do it. Just take the plunge.”

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Sarah and Denai from Yarm School in North Yorkshire – lead editors of The Dovecot magazine’s fifth edition, which swept the board at the 2025 Shine Awards.

The Dovecote started five years ago in 2020, founded by Katie Hunt. “It’s a good way of showing the talent that our student body has,” Sarah explains. “It contains art, nonfiction, fiction, travel writing, poetry. It’s just a way that students can express something that matters to them in different ways.”

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Tristan Clark-Lam, who attended two Shine Awards ceremonies and won at both – first for Scoop of the Year and Non-Fiction Writer of the Year, then returning the following year for more success as runner up in the Terry Mansfield CBE Award for Tomorrow’s Talent.

His story began with The Martlet, his school newspaper and a club that met weekly over tea and biscuits to discuss “what makes a good school paper and what do we want our school paper to achieve?”

“It was across school years,” Tristan explains. “A really nice time to spend every week with people from across the school, focusing around this project which everyone was really passionate about. The fact that I had mentors from years above and editors who passed on the reins throughout the school years really created a sense of community.”

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Edi Lea, winner of the 2025 award on our topic of the year ‘Leaders of tomorrow,’for her article “How to Start an Authoritarian Regime” – a satirical seven-step guide that made the judging panel fall off their chairs.

“It was really good fun writing it,” Edi recalls. “So fun to write and I hope it was fun to read.”

The article appeared in Exia, the magazine at City of Norwich School that Edi describes as “the pride and joy of our sixth form.” But as Edi explains, getting it there wasn’t easy, not least when you’re also one of the editors.

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Freddie Hayles and Bella Coombes, who transformed their school politics magazine The Eagle from “magazines that basically just looked like Word documents” into something that had their schoolfriends asking “when’s the next edition coming out?”

Freddie served as graphic designer, Bella as editor-in-chief. Together, they reorganised the entire structure of The Eagle – introducing proper application processes, defined roles and thematic organisation across three issues.

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Aditya Jayaram, winner of the 2024 Terry Mansfield Award CBE prize for Tomorrow’s Talent for his work transforming his school magazine Black and White.

When Aditya took over his school’s “flagship publication” at the start of Year 12, it was struggling. “It was a much smaller scale than it once was,” he recalls.

By the end of the year, alongside a great team, he’d transformed it into a proper publication with three editions and a school-wide audience. Then came the Shine Awards recognition – and everything that followed.