The Pelican Podcasts
Spread your intellectual wings!
We are excited to launch a brand new national competition for Y12 students (Y13 in NI/S5 in Scotland) designed to stimulate holistic thinking and the creative use of academic resources. We invite students to design and make their own short super-curricular podcast exploring an idea or theme that will have a cultural object which is local to them as a starting-point. This cultural object could be, for example, a piece of slang/dialect, a street name, a chant from your town’s football club, a coin found in a field behind your house, or something from your local physical landscape; in short, it can be anything that you think is an interesting cultural object that can be the springboard for you then to explore broader themes.
This is an opportunity for a team-based project, with schools entering teams of two to four students, and we expect (and even encourage) teams to be made up of students interested in different subjects. It is a chance both to work on independent research skills and to practice working collaboratively. This is important because, as we well know from our experience of life in a Cambridge College, often the most interesting insights come about through this process of cross-fertilization when engaging with different ways of approaching a topic. We are giving you free reign on how you want to structure your podcast. We want you to approach this in imaginative ways, and don’t want to stifle your creativity. We've put together a useful guide which will help get you started working on your idea.
A judging panel made up of a range of subject experts will draw up a shortlist of finalists from the submitted proposals. Finalists will then be asked to record their podcasts. The podcasts will be mastered by us, and then hosted on Spotify and other platforms, thus sharing your ideas with a wider audience and providing a super-curricular resource for more students in the years to come — and hopefully also inspiring other students to explore new areas of interest.
In addition, all the finalists will be invited to attend a two-day residential in September 2025 here at Corpus. They will have a chance to engage with a range of in-person super-curricular opportunities and to have a celebratory formal dinner in College, during which we shall announce the competition’s winning team.
This new programme is partly funded by a generous contribution from the Isaac Newton Trust's Widening Participation and Induction Fund
Timeline
25 April — Deadline for submission of podcast proposals
30 May – Shortlist of finalists announced
12 July — Deadline to submit recorded podcasts
14 August — All finalists’ podcasts uploaded to Spotify (and other platforms)
Mid-September — Residential at Corpus and winner announced.
Eligibility
This competition is open only to students in Year 12 (Year 13 in Northern Ireland/ S5 in Scotland) at UK maintained schools. All team members need to be on course for at least A*AA at A-level (or equivalent) and must meet at least one of our widening-participation criteria
Students who have been accepted onto the Pelican Programme are not eligible for the Pelican Podcasts.
If you are unsure about whether you are eligible for this programme, or if there are other circumstances that are not listed but which should be taken into consideration, please contact the Corpus Admissions Team.
Please note that your school can enter no more than two teams.
How to Enter
Each team will submit a podcast proposal that will include:
- What your object is and why you have chosen it
- A proposal form including the key points that you plan to cover in your podcast (no more than 500 words),
- A selection of materials and resources that you might use to research your ideas
- Names of each team member, what each of you is thinking of applying for at university, and to what parts of the podcast each of you will be contributing.