General News

This year, 8H/ En1 and 8B/ En3 rose to the challenge of writing passionately and creatively, through the form of verse! A number of students took pen to paper and entered the national Young Writers’ Poetry Trials competition, competing with thousands of other students from all over the UK.

After working hard to craft imaginative and perceptive poems, covering a range of issues such as racism, segregation and bullying, I am delighted to announce that a selection of our students have been chosen for publication within a special anthology!

Our students now have the opportunity to win an amazing Apple prize bundle, as the best poet in the book will be put forward as a finalist and invited to make a video reading for The Poetry Trials final. This is an amazing achievement and we are so proud of the hard work of all students who entered. What a brilliant end to a brilliant year! Keep up the great writing!

Congratulations to: Molly Wells, Chloe Hug, Chloe Hall, Amelia O’Hanlon, Brooke Carroll, Isabelle Doyle, Luca Atkinson, Adam Waheed, Patrick Lythgow, Casey Garrod, Josh Routledge, Rafia Hussain, Madiah Collector, Becky Daley, Cara Shepherd, Neha Sandhu, James Elles-Arnison, Luke Goule and Jessica Hiley.

The school library was recently awarded a small grant by the Siobhan Dowd Trust in recognition of the different things we do to encourage reading for pleasure amongst our young people. Some of our year 8 students were then given the task of using this grant to buy new books for the library! We visited Salts Mill bookshop where they carefully picked some great new fiction books. These books are now being added to our collection ready for all of our pupils to enjoy.

Miss Billingsley

Learning Resources Co-ordinator

Year 9 and 10 female computer scientists were invited to a Girls Development Day at Bradford University recently, learning all about Cyber Security as part of a GCHQ scheme to get more girls into Cyber jobs.  The event hosted a range of women in industry delivering workshops and talks about their jobs and different aspects of computer science security.  Emily Rushworth won a prize for her well thought out responses to questions during the opening talks.  Workshops included an informative look at how information travels across the Internet using Lego™ as well as discovering the ease in which information can be intercepted with simple freely available software.  The girls learnt about encryption using software they are familiar with such as WhatsApp.  They then excelled in a session on digital footprints where they searched for online information about themselves; considering the implications of their online reputation and the effects this could have on their employability.  The final session saw a discussion on what phishing is with useful advice about how to protect yourself and your family before creating the perfect phishing scam.  Two of our students were successful in winning a chocolatey prize for best design.  Unfortunately due to the presence of GCHQ we weren’t allowed to take photographs but the girls thoroughly enjoyed the experience and are looking forward to participating in the Cyber Security competition for girls commencing September this year.  So watch this space… with the high calibre of girls on the course we are sure to have some winners.

Although we were not winners this year (again) our second place means that we are one of the most successful schools at Rock Challenge in the North of England at the highest level of ‘Premier’ school.  In the last 5 years we have been placed in the top three 4 /5 occasions and have won the competition 4 times since 2002.  We came 2^nd in 2014, 1^st in 2015, 2^nd in 2016.

This year our piece was called ‘Suited’ and was inspired by a pack of playing cards.  Most  schools in the competition have a heavy involvement from the performing arts department who direct the choreography / drama / design etc…. Here at Thornton we pride ourselves on encouraging our 6^th form students to plan and lead the ideas covering the choreography, music, set, lighting and costumes.  They work with up to 80 students on the piece, which builds a great community spirit and develops strong leadership qualities in our students.  The students then create the whole 8 minute dance themselves with staff overseeing key elements of the production in an advisory capacity.  This student involvement makes our recent successes all the more poignant.

Samuel Purchon and Shannon Hopps (yr 13 students, choreographers and leaders for our piece)

“We have been part of the schools rock challenge team for 7 consecutive years and feel proud of the schools success of being titled the Northern Premier Champions twice.  We were the reigning champions and we are proud of  the talent that the students in our school possess with this year’s work ‘suited’.  A great sense of pride towards the piece is felt amongst us older students since we take on the more challenging roles as leaders creating the various elements of the work from choreography to design.  We love working as a team and inspiring the younger students with our amazing ideas.  We are glad that we have had the opportunity to be involved with such a great competition in Rock challenge.”

If you are interested in being in the Rock Challenge team then keep your eyes peeled for audition dates in the Autumn term.  Boys it would be great if we could get more of you involved, so don’t be shy and give it a go!

Courtney Gallagher-Rivers a year 12 student came back to school this week as the new WUKF World Champion after competing in Dublin this weekend against the best karate athletes in the world.  Courtney had 6 fights over the weekend against opponents from Romania, Italy, Slovakia, South Africa, Poland and Czech Republic and she won all her fights to take the title.

Congratulations from everyone at TGS!  We are very proud to have a World Champion in the Sixth Form.

The debate team have worked hard this year facing many challenging motions that have required lots of preparation and thought about how to argue sometimes for a view they may not normally support. Their skills in this have come on in leaps and bounds despite tough competition from the national champions Beckfoot.  After finishing 3^rd last year, the debate team were keen to make sure that we moved up the rankings this year.  We have achieved our goal and finished 2^nd in a 4 school competition, despite having to miss 2 debates this year and we now have our sights fixed on first place for next season. To go with this the 6^th form team competed in the national Debating Matters competition but were pipped at the post this year, we hope to be able to field a strong team again next year and progress to the next stage of the competition.