The School Community

It’s the week before Christmas, and everyone is looking forward to having some time at home with their families. Whichever community we live in, this holiday is traditionally a time for people to get together and share their common values.

Similarly a school magazine or newspaper offers a forum to bring together the various voices of your school. Whether in print or online, there is no better way for students to have their say, to entertain and to celebrate their points of view with their immediate community. In these sometimes insular days of social media, working as a team with a common purpose is good training for employment, but also instils feelings of belonging.

Over the past few messages I have tried to encourage schools to enter the Shine competition by detailing the potential benefits of taking part, the prizes and the connections with the communications industries. I’d like to use this opportunity to renew that encouragement. Schools with students who already run a magazine really have so much to gain by entering.

For schools which do not already have a publication up and running, I have reached out to those teaching Media Studies at GCSE, AS and A Level, as magazine content can be part of the coursework in these examinations. Essentially: the end result of your creativity and hard work for next summer’s exams is eligible for our prizes.

Today, I would like to suggest that even if your school does not run Media Studies courses and does not have a magazine, newspaper or podcast, it is not too late to put one together.

Content can be created in a lunchtime or an after-school club (or even detentions – this would be interesting!) and the publication can be as little as four sides of A4. We are looking for the original young voices of Britain today.

Originality, creativity, innovation, strong opinions, humour, well-crafted arguments, reportage, reviews, cartoons, great student radio programmes; anything which shows the energy and ethos of a young community. A school media project offers the opportunity to get together, discuss, focus, think and ultimately to create something bigger than an individual could achieve on their own. Hopefully, it should also be a lot of fun.

As I hope your Christmases will be! See you in 2019.

To register for Shine 2019 email us at shine@stationers.org

Alison Strachan
Chair of Shine