Department Lead: Ms H Ioannidis

Curriculum Intent

Our GCSE and BTEC Media options offer students two opportunities to explore their enjoyment of this subject and secure fantastic results. Consistently one of the highest achieving subjects at Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5, the Media team bring subject specialism and passion to every lesson – no wonder it continues to be one of the school’s most popular option choices.

Our Media options support the government’s specification to ensure all students access a broad, coherent and rigorous course of study, which prepare students to make informed decisions about further study and progression to A level, employment, apprenticeships or university choices.

Given the widespread popularity of social media, and the range of access we all now have to online entertainment streaming, skills in this field are increasingly in demand and so Media GCSEs and BTECs provide students with an improved potential to secure employment and careers in this ever developing industry.

Across the course of study, students will develop an understanding of and analytical approach to television, radio, music, video games, advertising, film, print media and online and social participatory media. The curriculum is designed in order to encourage critical evaluation skills and personal approaches to a variety of texts; within the study of these close study products (CSPs), students will be prompted to consider their own experience and approach to the media industry and analytically consider the role that it plays in their own lives.

Within the Media curriculum there are frequent opportunities for cross curricular links with aspects of English language, history, politics and psychology and sociology. In particular the reference to multiple theoretical studies allows students to explore how media texts are purposefully manipulative, and the strategies that media production teams have utilised and refined over the last century. The Media curriculum is underpinned by an engagement with the key concepts of media studies: industry, audience, language and representation.
In addition to the different exam requirements for both options, students have the opportunity to work on and produce their own projects and thus demonstrate the creativity, independence and organisational skills so in demand across employment industries and at further education. The freedom of personal choice in their design represents the overriding intent of the media course, which is to encourage passionate, personal interaction with this vast, creative and constantly shifting industry.

By offering the students opportunities to engage with this diverse curriculum, in addition to allowing them to practise and hone their technical ability with a practical project, it is hoped that students will feel confident and excited at the prospect of continuing their media study at A Level and BTEC at Sixth Form and beyond.