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Pupils at Rushcliffe School have won the new Lord Lieutenant’s award after participating in 2500 hours of
voluntary service over the last year. A third of our 1500 pupils have been involved in a wide range of projects supporting
national charities and the local community. The voluntary work included:
cooking Christmas dinner for the residents of a local care home each year
supporting a disabled centre, nursery and school in Malawi
going into a local care home to spending time with people with dementia
planning and delivering a series of sports festivals to feeder primary schools
constructing a sensory garden for a local church’s nursery group
organising an annual fundraising festival to support children at The School of Hope in Guatemala
carrying out volunteer work in Ecuador for the local community.
Every year group chooses a charity (Help for Hero’s, Alzheimer’s Research UK and Teenage Cancer Trust have recently
been chosen) to support and organise fundraising activities for.
Vice Lord Lieutenant, Colonel Timothy Richmond, and Deputy Lord Lieutenant Arthur Sandford visited the school to
present the award.
Being a ‘World Class School’ brings many exciting opportunities and in September we were invited to
enter an academic competition challenging our students’ English and Science writing skills.
A range of Year 9 classes were chosen to work on a very special project bringing together curriculum
areas to provoke and inspire young minds. Teachers in the Science and English departments worked
with their classes to research information about the teenage brain and produce a discursive essay for submission to
the annual ‘World Class Schools Quality Mark Essay Writing competition’.
Students were given a masterclass lesson by the Science department in which they learnt
about how to approach scientific research, where to access academic journals and texts
and crucially how to reference their research like a professional. They were then given independent
research time to compile their sources and information based on the areas they
were interested in. Students then came to a masterclass in English on how they might
structure and write their essay, focussing on integrating their research into their work and
exploring their own ideas.
Year Nine students showed impressive skills in exploring the topic and came away with a
range of exciting ideas and understanding about their brains aiming to answer the following
question: "What evidence do we have that teenagers' brains are different from adults'
brains?” The brief then went to ask students to consider why they think teenagers might “need brains which work differently?"
All students demonstrated a mature and insightful approach to the subject matter and an ability to form a
well-argued and evidenced piece of writing.
From all the essays submitted, the two students who were selected to represent the Rushcliffe School in the competition
against other World Class Schools are Annabel Bowles and Molly Palmer both of whom produced engaging,
original and thorough essays on the subject of the teenage brain. Well done girls! Dr Gaskell