Shine news

With exams approaching for many students, the Spring Term is all about priorities and achievement. We know that extracurricular activities, sports and evening clubs get squeezed in the face of important learning. All the same, it’s widely accepted that accomplishing creative projects is a way for students to find balance away from their academic studies.

We’d like to encourage those initiatives – like a podcast club, or group creating topic-based journalism. Our Shine Awards for outstanding writing are given for students with an ambition to tell stories about their lived experiences or issues affecting the world – as they see it.

We often hear it’s a challenge to reboot a classroom in January, and perhaps that’s especially true with this very cold start to 2025.

Our deadline for this year’s Shine School Media Awards is in early May, so today I am suggesting that within this short term there’s an opportunity for creativity and learning with a one-off media project.

At the Shine School Media Awards we love it when a school starts a new magazine, newspaper or podcast from scratch, or revives one with a new editorial team.

However we’ve also got a lot of love for schools that already produce a Shine-eligible project.

And… you may not even realise you’re doing this. We tell you how…

Last week I had a great time catching up with three past winners of the Shine School Media Awards. Each won in the last few years and I was really struck by the way they carry a pure enthusiasm for publishing.

That call to write, investigate and share is one that runs strong in all our entrants. I can’t help but wonder how many students you encounter in the classroom where it’s abundantly clear their talents mark them out as potentially incredible journalists or authors.

At this summer’s Shine Awards, one announcement stood out as being the cliffhanger of the day. It was our latest addition to the lineup, rewarding a student who had gone the extra mile to tell a truly remarkable story.

The new prize is called Scoop of the Year and was supported by the London Press Club – who have just announced they are going to sponsor the prize for a second year in 2025.

What does the school magazine look like in 2025? I think many teachers assume it needs to be expensively printed or involve professional design software. But the truth is that most schools that enter the Shine School Media Awards do so by contriving their own path to publishing.

I asked Sharon Maxwell Magnus, head of outreach in the school of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, about the real opportunities students can gain from a school magazine. Here’s what she had to say…