Coppice Performing Arts School

BTEC First Diploma in Media

Opportunities available to you

The course enables students to study a broad range of topics across the media industries spectrum. The qualification covers a mixture of units from those with a focus on applied knowledge through to those with a clear practical emphasis.

Structure of the course

Students will study 6 units in total over the 2 years including 3 core units and 3 specialist units. All units are assessed by coursework, and marked internally.
Topics are likely to include:

• Understanding the Media
• Research for Media production
• Media Skills Development
• Video Production
• Advertising Production
• Audio Production

Career routes involving BTEC Media

The qualification allows for a number of progression routes:

The units studied provide a sound basis for progression onto a variety of advanced qualifications, such as BTEC National Awards.

The media sector is an important and fast growing area of employment. This allows you to develop personal skills such as (initiative, teamwork, problem solving) combined with work-related knowledge. This means that students are particularly suitable for recruitment in a range of employment categories.

Our Perspective - Media Students

BTEC Media is different from any other subject; you can use many different skills from other lessons for example graphic work for designing your own adverts or ICT when it comes to editing film footage. Over the past year and a half, the year 11 media class have learnt about many different aspects of media. At the beginning of year 10, we helped to put together, with the rest of the year, the first ever BTEC disco for the lower years. We used our filming and editing skills to film the disco and interview staff and students before hand. We have also wrote our own script for a breakfast show in which we made our own jingle on Garageband and also learnt how to use the mixing decks. We have also had a chance to film our own short adverts advertising our own drink in a reality TV show style. We used story boards and scripts and gave everybody an individual job to ensure we worked well as a team.

We have also been on many trips including courses at the City Learning Centre where we developed our editing techniques further by filming our own short versions of Eastenders. Another trip we have been on was to Connect Advertising Agency where we experienced for ourselves how an advertising agency runs and each individual job. We are currently designing a radio, film and print advert to advertise the school. I feel I have learnt a lot from taking media and we are all enjoying the course so far!

Click here to visit the Edexcel website for more information.

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