Grade 5 in GCSE English Language and GCSE English Literature.
Alongside the entry requirements for each course, you will also need to achieve the minimum Sixth Form entry requirements.
Assessment
Examinations: 70% of A-Level Coursework: 30% of A-Level
Next Steps
Media is an ever-growing world with increasing employment opportunities. Future careers may involve traditional advertising and marketing, working for institutions like the BBC or C4 - or in newer areas like digital/viral marketing, post-production and branding.
A-Level in Media Studies
Media Studies is the kind of course in which students are very actively involved and, as a consequence, confidence and expertise can increase quite sharply. Practical work forms part of the course and students are given the opportunity to create their own cross-media production. We look at both traditional and new media and consider many of the big changes that have occurred in the media world and their impact on our lives.
Production work is 30% of the course and is delivered through an industry standard brief. You will have a choice of options and will then have to develop a product to meet the brief that’s been set.
This is fully practical and will see you involved in photography, graphic design, image manipulation, moving images, video editing, website production, radio broadcasting and film promotion. You choose the brief and the media technologies to play to your strengths and interest – a real selling point of the course we think.
The remaining 70% of the course is assessed via examination. Everything in Media Studies A Level fall into four main areas of study – language, representation, audience and industry so this means that whatever you’re learning about will be able to be related to one of these four concepts in some way. This applies to your own practical work as well.
You study a wide range of media forms – marketing, music videos, film industry, video games, radio, newspapers, TV, magazines and online media. Within these we have set texts to apply the media concepts to, so for example in the TV unit we might be asked to study Peaky Blinders, in the magazines unit we might like at a historical women’s magazine from the 1950’s and in music videos Beyonce’s ‘Formation’. These set texts are then supplemented with products that we choose ourselves to ensure that you are looking at a wide range of products and seeing a variety of styles – some mainstream, some not. Students tell us they really like this variety.