Media Studies

Trust Curriculum Intent

Our mission is to provide a cradle to career education that allows our children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity. By the age of 18, we want every child to have the option of university or a high quality alternative. 

Subject Curriculum Intent

Media Studies at Brigshaw teaches pupils seeks to develop in its students a creative passion to contribute positive and exciting media products towards the industry: both through GCSE and A Level coursework as well as through industry links to encourage career uptake within the sector.

Media studies is also increasingly vital for students to have a clearer understanding of how media influence works: of how media institutions can shape messages which may or may not be biased; of how different audiences are likely to respond to messages in different ways and of how crucial it is to be able to process messages from multiple sources in order to arrive at their own informed opinion. In media studies, through our study of a wide range of texts from television, film, radio, print and online media, we aim to support our students in all of this in order for them to become critical, creative and independent thinkers. By building our curriculum around the media framework areas of media language representation, audience and institution and by spiralling through these four areas with each text we encounter, students are able to understand a text’s purpose and potential impacts with increasing independence and insight, preparing them for an adult world saturated by media messaging.

Curriculum Principles

• Backwards planning is approached in the media curriculum by the careful selection and sequencing of the media texts.  Knowledge of the four framework areas, by Year 13, is deep and broad concerning theory, context and of how to apply both to textual analysis. Similarly, our expectation of technical control and creativity when producing media products rivals industry standards in year 13. In both cases, what is needed at this level is carefully mapped backwards so that knowledge within each of the four framework areas and creative ability accumulates across the KS4 and KS5 course.

• Long term memory is developed in the media curriculum through revisiting key concepts across the four framework areas with every new text we encounter. Low stakes quizzing and end of topic tests assess recent and iterative knowledge to consolidate a deeper understanding.   Formative assessment in day to day lessons and less regular summative assessment captures current and previous knowledge and allows the teaching team to respond. 

• Cognitive psychology principles are addressed in the media curriculum through the regular and planned provision of independent retrieval in the form of silent starters and the subsequent self assessment and correction. Lessons place an increasing emphasis on independent practice to develop metacognitive planning, doing and reviewing skills and we ensure success in these sections through “I, we, you” lesson planning with clear outcomes and success criteria.  Students are required to “think hard” during their lessons and student attention is carefully guided by the teacher so that lesson objectives are met effectively.  

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What will this look like at implementation?

Please use the links to explore how our curriculum looks, for each year group, as a result of these guiding principles

How can you support students’ learning from home?

When reading, watching or listening to the news, start discussions about how a story is being presented and whether the report shows any bias. How do you know?

When encountering an advert online, on television or in print, ask how a product or person is being represented and why

Visit the Science and Media Museum in Bradford and learn about how the media sector and its products has evolved over time.

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