MCMA is not about creating media people!  If some of our students get jobs in the media and creative industries then great, but we are about harnessing the excitement and vibrancy of creative technologies and the creative arts to secure outstanding learning opportunities for our students.  First and foremost we need to get our children into the academy and get them attending regularly.  They need to want to come and this means that we have to offer something that makes them want to be here and work hard.  We are developing an exciting curriculum offer and preparing for the move to our new building by undertaking a huge curriculum review.  Our new 2012 curriculum will make the most of the amazing facilities that will be at our disposal and of the latest technologies that we will develop over the next few months prior to opening.

Not only will the equipment and facilities be first rate but our staff will be too.  This year we began to see the impact that our new reputation is having in that we were able to recruit some outstanding teachers.  We now have 7 teachers who are either already ‘Advanced Skills Teachers’ (AST) or are about to meet the qualification standards.  This is probably more ASTs than at any other school or academy in the northwest if not even wider.  If you couple this with the now more trimmed down and even more effective staff that we already had and the future looks extremely bright for our students.  If we  also add in additional leadership capacity to develop our middle leaders and our technological capacity then you start to think that things are really moving fast at our academy……but if you throw in an absolutely outstanding English and Maths intervention team with a well proven track record of success and you would rightly conclude that things have changed at MCMA and the place is really taking off.

This is not the end of this years developments though.  There have been improvements to our house system, our pastoral teams and huge improvements in our attendance levels.  We also will be lauching a huge development of the House system linked to business and the creative and manufacturing industries.  Parents and the wider community will begin to see the fruits of the foundation building that has been going on around developing links with industry very soon.  We have already done two feature length films and a variety of short projects but our students are now involved in developing a series of phone ‘apps’ to go with the new building and help other students to access the facilities more easily.  This is being done with a commercial, cutting edge company.  In the near future we will be launching a series of animation projects for our students to produce as well as a number of other ‘commissions’ for them to get their teeth in to.

Our arts work is growing also.  We have outstanding recording and music technology facilities which our sixth form students use fully and with excellent results.  In the summer we held our first off-site Art Exhibition within the community and that was an outstanding success.  Our drama work has been second to none with the two feature films that we have produced and our dance groups have been winners both locally and more widely.  We have a Spanish artist in residence for a week producing huge puppets with our students and a team also produced a winning animation entry for the launch of the ‘Sharp Project’.  There is no doubt that our students are very creative but there is much more to us than this!  Why not come and see us at the open evening events.  That will truly astound you.