The media studies curriculum at Sprowston Community Academy aims to develop our students’ confidence to critically engage with media texts of all styles and types. Across the course of study, students will develop, through analytical approaches and creative production responses, a deeper and critical understanding of 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, initially set by the exam board but supported by wider reading of further texts we have chosen.
Students are encouraged 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 at both GCSE and A level there are frequent opportunities for wider learning and the development of transferable skills including links with processes, concepts and practices from other subjects.
The KS4 and the KS5 media curriculum are underpinned by an engagement with the key concepts of media studies: industry, audience, language and representation. We create opportunities for pupils to learn the key knowledge and skills needed and we regularly revisit topics deliberately and systematically in our planning to develop long term memory.
In the first year of each course students build the required familiarity with the rigorous requirements of the exams, develop analytical skills across a range of media and practice applying their knowledge through engaging with practical briefs that consolidate their learning. End of unit revision tests provide purposeful practise of key exam questions, allow us to check the student’s understanding and address common misconceptions. External examinations take place at the end of the course and these are assessed by the exam board using national grade boundaries.
Within the Non-Exam Assessment students will be given an exciting opportunity to independently approach a topic of their choice within the Eduqas stipulated tasks. This independent coursework task allows students to creatively design and produce a media product of their own and actively apply the theoretical approaches to the industry that they have acquired across the course. 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. This unit is assessed by the Media Studies Department and moderated by the exam board.