Media Studies is a fascinating subject which requires students to develop their understanding of the world around them. They study all different types of media products at both GCSE and A Level, and think about how they are constructed, what they are saying about different groups of people or ideas, and the industrial and business aspects of the platform they are created for.

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Media Studies is also about creating media products using industry standard technology.

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The best Media Studies students are inquisitive, actively engaged in the media and hard working - if you want a career in the media industries, you will need these qualities.

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The skill we develop the most in Media Studies is analysis. Students are able to deconstruct media products considering genre, narrative structure, semiotics, technical and visual codes, mode of address, ideologies and values in representations; and that's just GCSE!

 

Students are required to apply and evaluate media theorists such as Stuart Hall, David Gauntlett, bell Hooks, Laura Mulvey and Claude Levi Strauss to name but a few. They are able to consider how audiences respond to particular ideologies and how we are all susceptible to cultivation of those ideologies, how the media creates moral panic and also shapes our identities. Students at A Level are able to research audiences alongside writing academically, often at undergraduate level.

 

But what is most important is that students develop a sense of the world around them and begin to question the media they consume. They understand the importance of self representation on social media, they see the bias in political coverage, they evaluate the importance of British cinema to the UK economy. They enter the subject at GCSE and A Level knowing an awful lot about different media platforms, but they leave being able to analyse and question those same platforms, and aware that, in society today, an education in the media is a valuable thing.