The Media Studies Department is housed in purpose built facilities. It has a range of up to date equipment including 12 DV camcorders, 6 non-linear digital editing suites, a television studio.

Teaching is student centred and flexible, often utilising our growing research library. Staff are encouraged to build units of work which inspire both themselves and their students. Our policy is to keep up to date, be exciting and academically challenging.

Recent successful units of work have included:

+ Changes in the style and content of broadcast news
+ Genre within blaxploitation films
+ Narrative and institution within James Bond
+ Realism in British Cinema & Documentary
+ Issues of censorship
+ Broadcasting ownership and history
+ The alternative cinema of Derek Jarman and contemporary American independents
+ Ideologies of nationhood within television advertising
+ The shifting structure of the teenage magazine market
+ 'Gladiators' as a popular cultural artefact
+ Changing representations within television crime drama

We contribute to wider school life by providing resources and back-up across departments and social activities throughout the year.

Extract from the Ofsted 2004 on Medi

+ Achievement is very good.
+ Resources are excellent and well used by a wide range of students.
+ A very high level of technical competence is available to students, both in and outside lessons.

Standards are good in Year 12. Students' level of achievement is very good, some of it from a very low base, in response to good and very good lessons informed by an excellent level of technical competence.
Teaching and learning are consistently good and sometimes very good. Teachers' knowledge is of a high order and they have up-to-date technical knowledge. Careful planning, very clear objectives which are shared with the students and a high level of individual attention, both in lessons and at other times during the school day, are key to student success.

In the GNVQ Standards are high and achievement is very good, with a significant number of students doing better than their targets predict. Teaching is good. Lessons are well planned and have clear aims and objectives. The teachers' knowledge of the subject is very good and resources are appropriate to the learning needs of the group.