Shine news

The entry deadline for the Shine School Media Awards 2026 is this Friday, 1st May.

Whatever your students have been working on this year, it deserves to be seen. Our judging panel includes industry professionals at the top of their field, and they’re genuinely looking forward to discovering what’s out there in schools.

The entry deadline for the 2026 Shine School Media Awards is Friday 1st May. If you haven’t submitted yet, this is the moment.

We know what happens at the beginning of term. Inboxes fill up, exam season is approaching and competition deadlines slip quietly past. So consider this a cheeky nudge: if your school produces a student newspaper, magazine or podcast, your entry is almost certainly ready. It just needs submitting.

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.

This week, I’ve got an incredible story of the way in which a Shine Award provided an outstanding professional experience for two winning students and how they think about print and design.

When Charlton Cooper and Alfie walked into Heidelberg UK headquarters, they were expecting a brief introduction and perhaps a quick tour. What they got was something far more valuable: an entire day immersed in professional print production, guided by industry leaders who were genuinely invested in their learning.

Imagine getting money-can’t-buy access to a live journalism environment for your students. That’s exactly what happened for two of our winners who spent a day shadowing Liz Hunt, Senior Associate Editor at the Daily Mail.

At the Shine School Media Awards we reward the UK’s most talented secondary school students creating a school newspaper, magazine or podcast with incredible prizes. This is the story of two winners who achieved just that, with Senior Associate Editor Liz Hunt.