Nettlebed School Wins STEM St Mary’s School Challenge

Children from four schools from the Henley area have been showing off their skills in science, technology, engineering and maths with the  STEM Challenge. Hosted by St Mary’s School on Tuesday, Year 4 pupils from St Mary’s, Nettlebed, Trinity and Valley Road primary schools, worked together on a number of challenges that aimed to inject creativity into four of the more academic subjects.

Year Six Pupils from St Mary’s, acted as ambassadors and supervised the event with one pupil being allocated to each team of five. A separate group then coordinated the results and marked all the papers. The challenges included paper-based and practical problems.

Huxford, a pupil from St Mary’s said “I really liked building the airplane and preferred it to answering the questions.”

Rob Harmer, the Headmaster at St Mary’s, said “At St. Mary’s, we are always looking for ways to challenge and extend our most able and talented pupils. We know that children excel in a number of different areas and were delighted to offer those whose strengths lie in STEM, an opportunity to challenge themselves.   In our recent ISI Inspection, the team found that the St. Mary’s ‘pupils’ numeracy skills are a great strength: their enjoyment of this subject is wholly apparent.”

Caroline Dowling, the Head of Maths at St Mary’s said,  “It was wonderful to welcome a number of our local primary schools into St. Mary’s, to join us for such a fun afternoon of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.  The children approached their challenges with enormous enthusiasm, working well in their teams, and using their skills and knowledge to successfully complete each task.  All of the teams worked really hard.”

The team from Nettlebed Primary School was the winner, beating team St. Mary’s by just half a point.