Parkside Community College

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Parkside Community College is a state secondary school of about 600 pupils situated in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. The college is situated in the centre of the city, a road away from Parker's Piece. The college is now a member of the Parkside Federation along with Coleridge Community College. Parkside was the first school to be designated a specialist media arts college in 1997, under the UK government's specialist schools programme.

The long history of the school is related in An Epoch-Making School, by former Deputy Principal Rosemary Gardiner (1983), which presents the transformations of the school from its origin as the Higher Grade Schools in Melbourne Place (1913), through its successive incarnations as the Central School for Boys and Girls and the Girls’ Grammar School, to its status as a co-educational comprehensive in 1974.

Its work as a specialist media arts college has been documented in a number of research studies by staff at the school. These include studies of an extensive primary school animation project (eg Burn and Parker, 2001), run in conjunction with the Cambridge Film Consortium, a group composed of Anglia Ruskin University, City Screen (an Arts cinema chain), the Cambridge Film Festival, and Parkside itself.

The most recent and comprehensive account of the school’s media work, giving examples of work in digital video, computer games, animation, and television drama, as well as work across the curriculum, is provided in Burn and Durran’s Media Literacy in Schools (2007).

The school is now federated with Coleridge Community College under Principal Andrew Hutchinson, and has developed a second specialism in Modern Foreign Languages.

References

Burn A & Parker D (2001), ‘Making your Mark: Digital Inscription, Animation, and a New Visual Semiotic’, Education, Communication & Information, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp 155-179 (and online at http://www.open.ac.uk/eci/burn/featset.html)

Burn, A and Durran, J (2007) Media Literacy in Schools: practice, production and progression. London: Paul Chapman

Gardiner, R (1983) An Epoch-Making School, Parkside Community College: Cambridge