Pudsey Sixth Form College – Principal’s Welcome
WCAG 2.1 AA TRANSCRIPT
Interviewee: Phil Mark, Principal – Pudsey Sixth Form College (SPEAKING)
Music: A bright, uplifting, and rhythmic acoustic instrumental track plays, featuring a steady beat and light guitar melodies.
Scenery: The video opens with a wide, sweeping drone shot of the Pudsey Sixth Form College building, a modern two-story structure with grey cladding and large glass windows. The sky is bright and clear. A white logo for “Pudsey Sixth Form College” sits in the centre of the screen against a dark blue filter that slowly fades. The camera then cuts to Phil Mark sitting in a large, sunlit atrium. He has short hair, wears a brown suit jacket over a pink shirt with an open collar, and a black lanyard.
Music: The volume lowers and continues as steady background music.
Scenery: Phil sits in the centre of the atrium. Behind him, there are modern wooden slats on the walls, a glass balcony on the first floor, and clusters of circular tables and chairs. A light green banner appears at the footer with white text: “Dr Phil Mark. Principal – Pudsey Sixth Form College”.
Speaker: Phil Mark “Hello, everyone. I’m Phil Mark, I’m Principal here at Pudsey Sixth Form College. First of all, thank you so much for considering Pudsey Sixth Form College for your young people’s future. We’re so proud of what we’ve been able to build here. We’re so proud of being a new institution with amazing facilities, a really, really top-class environment that we’ve managed to create.”
Scenery: As Phil speaks, the camera cuts to a montage of the college facilities. It shows bright social spaces and outdoor areas. Then, it cuts to a bright classroom with white tables and high-specification computers.
Speaker: Phil Mark “One of the things that we’re proudest of here at Pudsey Sixth Form College is the sense of community, a sense of safety and welcome that all of our students are part of, and the real sense of community, identity and togetherness that our staff have managed to develop on-site.”
Scenery: The camera cuts back to Phil in the atrium. He gestures to the space around him.
Speaker: Phil Mark “Right now, I’m in our main atrium, which is the main central point where students and staff eat their lunch together and come in and check in for the morning. We have a fantastic lecture theatre, we’ve got all new facilities and a huge array of possible courses for students to do.”
Scenery: The camera cuts to a close-up of a sign on a glass door that reads “Study Plus.” Inside, students are seen sitting at desks, focused on their work. The camera then cuts to a shot of a staff member smiling and greeting a student at the main entrance.
Speaker: Phil Mark “One of the things that we’re really, really proud of is the way in which we’ve got individual support for students. So, students come into Pudsey in the morning, they’re checked in by our staff. They then go all together to the first period where they have fantastic lessons ready to go.”
Scenery: The camera cuts to a classroom where a teacher is writing on a large interactive whiteboard while students take notes. Then, it cuts to a montage of “Enrichment” activities: a group of students practicing sign language, followed by a shot of two students engaged in an animated debate in a seminar room.
Speaker: Phil Mark “One of the things that makes us different as a sixth form is the importance that we place on enrichment: trips, visits and extracurricular activities. So all students, while here, have enrichment on their timetable. So that can range from things such as British Sign Language, philosophy and debating society, sporting activities, a whole range of groups.”
Scenery: The camera shows a group of students walking together through a university campus, followed by a shot of a guest speaker in a suit addressing a group of attentive students in the lecture theatre.
Speaker: Phil Mark “And we also do Skills Builder activities together. So all of our students at the same time engage in trips to universities. We have visiting speakers from business, or we engage in competitions and various other methods of building the broader skills that you need in order to really thrive and move on to the next level.”
Scenery: Cut back to Phil in the atrium, then to a shot of a student working one-on-one with a staff member in a quiet, glass-walled office.
Speaker: Phil Mark “That’s also embedded in the way in which we do our curriculum. So all of our students benefit from what we call Study Plus, which is timetabled supervised study where students get extra support from their teachers, or they can just find the time in some of our fantastic facilities to have some quiet, focused study time.”
Scenery: The camera cuts to a shot of the “iLearn” area, showing students using laptops in a comfortable lounge-style seating area. It then cuts to Phil.
Speaker: Phil Mark “We’re really, really committed to the idea of wellbeing. So lots and lots of our students benefit from the relationships that they have with the staff and students, particularly our safety officers—our Stay Safe officers—and our student relations officers and our iLearn staff. So all of the students here get to have really, really trusted 1-to-1 relationships and have a fantastic progress coach who will drive them through and make sure that they have all the skills they need to succeed.”
Scenery: A montage shows students laughing together in the atrium during lunchtime, followed by a group of students in high-visibility vests picking up litter in a local park.
Speaker: Phil Mark “The way in which we do our timetable and the support that we offer is also part of our educational character. So we are an absolutely aspirational, but also truly inclusive sixth form college. What that means is that we set really, really high aspirations for our students… It comes down to the fact that we all sit within the same site together. We have one entrance point and we all go off to our sessions at the same time. We have a really strong sense of coming together at lunchtimes. All of our students sit and eat together and clean up together.”
Scenery: The camera cuts to a shot of a train station platform where students are installing colourful artwork on the walls. Then, it cuts to a “Dragon’s Den” style setup where a student is presenting a slideshow to three adults in business attire.
Speaker: Phil Mark “Being part of Pudsey is really important to us as well, so lots of the skills that our students develop are tied to the local community, whether that’s going out and doing a litter pick together, whether that’s going out and adopting the local train station where we’re developing artwork with our fantastic arts and creative students, or whether that’s the links that we’ve developed with businesses, so we can have businesses come into us and run really high-challenge competitions where students are invited to develop products and pitch those in a sort of Dragon’s Den environment to those businesses.”
Scenery: Cut back to Phil speaking directly to the camera.
Speaker: Phil Mark “We’re really setting the bar very high in terms of what we expect of our learners, but we’re ensuring that the students get throughout their working week the opportunities to develop the skills needed to succeed.”
Scenery: A graphic appears on the screen listing the partner schools: Leeds West Academy, Priesthorpe Academy, and Crawshaw Academy.
Speaker: Phil Mark “We’ve got over 40 different schools come to us at Pudsey Sixth Form College. Our primary relationship is with our three partner schools: that’s Leeds West, Priesthorpe and Crawshaw. But of course, we are open to applications from any schools where students can manage to come to us.”
Scenery: The camera pans across a diverse group of students working together on a science experiment in a lab.
Speaker: Phil Mark “They’ve come together in a really amazing way, those students from very, very diverse backgrounds. It’s also part of the fact that we offer a really quite unique step up to our Level 3 provision. So we have a three-year A-level offer that is an opportunity to resit a whole raft of GCSEs and aim for really very high grades in those—fives, sixes, sevens, eights.”
Scenery: Cut back to Phil. He looks thoughtful and proud.
Speaker: Phil Mark “We’ve even had some nines previously on that Step Up programme, in which case students can then access A-levels in their second year. We do believe that students deserve another chance at that. But we are an institution—we are primarily a sixth form college—and what we want to do is ensure that students leave us with the skills and abilities they need to progress on to university or a really, really high-quality apprenticeship.”
Scenery: The camera pans across the exterior of the college again, showing the finished landscaping and the main entrance buzzing with students.
Speaker: Phil Mark “We recognise that it’s the first year of our operation here at Pudsey Sixth Form College… perhaps the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life is to get this college up and running. It has been an enormous success in terms of having a full raft of A-levels, a full raft of teachers available of fantastic quality and 140 wonderful students.”
Scenery: The camera focuses on Phil for the final address.
Speaker: Phil Mark “Starting with our new Year 12, we have really, really high aspirations for our new Year 12. Starting in September 2026, we want at least 200, if not more, new students to come and join us… we’re really excited to be starting September with both Year 12 and Year 13s in our building. So we think it’s a great thing for Pudsey. We think it’s great for the local area, but most of all we think it’s great for young people and their opportunities. So we really look forward to seeing you.”
Scenery: The screen fades to a dark blue. The white “Pudsey Sixth Form College” logo reappears in the centre with the website URL below it.
Music: The acoustic track reaches a final chord and ends.
