This year, as part of the West Wilts Federation for AGT, we were delighted to attend a conference at The Queen's College, Oxford. This conference was an opportunity for year 9 students from across the Federation to get to know their peers from other schools and develop skills they might not usually work on in school, including problem solving and team work with people they were unfamiliar with.Ten students from each school attended the conference, along with two sixth form mentors, who worked extremely hard to ensure the students all stayed on task and did their best. Each Y9 group was made up of a student from each school, and the conference began on Wednesday afternoon with team building games and activities to allow the groups to meet each other. Once at the conference, each team was given a newspaper from which they had to identify problems facing our nation today. From these, each team was given one topic to focus on for the rest of the conference. They then carried out research from the newspapers and online to create an eight minute presentation on the causes, consequences and possible solutions to the problem they had been given.
This proved quite the challenge for the pupils, who had to come up with engaging presentations without the use of IT: I have to say that I have never seen newspapers so well used! The standard of the final presentations was extremely high and, as a judge, I must confess that it was extremely close and took us a long time to decide on a winning team.
As well as all the hard work, pupils were also offered a short tour around the sights of Oxford and we had a formal dinner at Queen's on Thursday night.
We were lucky to have a number of inspiring speakers to entertain us. The Provost opened the conference with a short history of The Queen's College, and our keynote speaker was Dr Sarah McElwee, a researcher in psychology and education with a particular interest in AGT, who talked to us about the issues surrounding the use of scientific research. At dinner, the Proctor of the college talked to us about college life, and some famous alumni, including Tim Berners-Lee and Rowan Atkinson; and the conference was closed by the college Admissions Tutor who gave the students some tips on applying to Oxford.Overall, the conference was a resounding success and the students really enjoyed it. I think it helped to open their eyes a little to what is out there and hopefully it will inspire them to aim high in the coming years.
