Media Studies

Media Studies has been taught at Lawrence Sheriff School since 1988 and the Department has enjoyed a spectacular rate of success. Only Maths and Business Studies attract larger numbers of candidates in the sixth form and A Level results have been consistently excellent. In recent years we have added great value to students’ grades with more than 60% of students regularly attaining one of the top two grades at A Level and in 2007 97% of students achieved either an A or B grade.

In our school, Media Studies is a subject strongly driven by current affairs, particularly at A Level. Few aspects of the subject remain constant: it continuously evolves, just as the media themselves are endlessly developing and changing.

 We concern ourselves with nine principal aspects of the mass media:

• Textual creativity – how media texts are constructed

• Production – how media products are made, and the influences upon this of economics and changes in technology

• Genre – how texts are classified according to their content and the distinguishing characteristics of each type

• Ownership – who controls the media, and more importantly, determines the nature of their content

• Audiences – how audiences are constructed and targeted by people in the media industries, and the ways in which audiences use, and respond to, the media

• Representation – the ways in which political, ethical and social issues are portrayed, and the ways in which the media deal with groups of people defined by such factors as age, gender, race and occupation

• Regulation – how the various media are controlled, both by Acts of Parliament and through codes of practice set up by official regulatory bodies, as well less formal influences such as public opinion

• Languages – the register, style and lexis employed in individual media products; the jargon of media production; and the specialised terminology of critical analysis