A group of our year 8 girls have once again done the school proud by competing in the Cyberfirst girls competition which is run by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of the GCHQ.

The CyberFirst Girls Competition provides a fun and challenging environment to inspire the next generation of young women to consider a career in cyber security. For 10 days in January the girls gave up their lunchtimes and were allowed an afternoon off timetable to compete in the qualifying round. We were delighted to be informed that one of our teams had accumulated enough points to put them through to the national semi-final stage that would pit them against top schools in the region as well as centres in four different regions in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

On Saturday 8^th February our team of girls attended the semi-final round at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

A day of gruelling problem solving, lateral thinking and networking saw our team reach the dizzying heights of third place in the first hour of the competition but as the day wore on and teams with full compliments of four members got into the swing of things the girls ended the day a very credible 14^th out of 30 in the region and around 700 teams in total!

All the girls who participated should be extremely proud of themselves, the challenges were very, very difficult and they all applied themselves with aplomb.