Shine news

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.

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.