Welcome to the Shine School Media Awards!
The Shine School Media Awards is a free national competition that rewards a diversity of talent from secondary schools across the UK who work on the writing, editing, design and fund-raising for a school newspaper, magazine or multimedia project such as a podcast or digital publication.
The annual culmination of each year’s Shine Awards is a gala ceremony held in central London every summer with student workshops and incredible guest speakers.
The significant benefits of starting a Shine project include an enrichment of the school curriculum, an incentive to creativity and the chance for pupils to win national recognition and in the process enrich their CV and applications for university or college.
The Shine Awards is an endeavour of The Stationers’ Foundation, the charitable arm of The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, one of the UK’s ancient livery companies.
Latest news
9th December 2025
Best wishes of the season… and a taste of things to come in 2026
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.
Our entrants speak...
“Creating a student publication is a wonderful way to involve pupils across a school and enable them to express themselves and be part of a community. It is then even more rewarding to be involved with the Shine Awards which celebrates their success and offers inspirational advice from industry professionals.”
Craig Cole, Head of Graphics, Photography & Printing Reed’s School, Surrey
More feedback from schools