Form, purpose and audience

NEW LUNCHTIME CODING CLUB — STARTS NEXT WEEK

Ever wanted to build your own game, app or website? Now you can. The school is launching a brand-new Coding Club, and it is open to absolutely everyone — whether you have written a thousand lines of code or have never touched a keyboard beyond your phone.

What is it? Coding Club is a relaxed, friendly space to learn how to make things with code. No experience is needed. You will start with the basics, work through small projects at your own pace, and — if you want to — team up with other students to build something bigger. By the end of term, you could have your own working mini-game to show off.

When and where? We meet every Wednesday lunchtime, 1:00 to 1:45 pm, in Computer Lab 2 (next to the library). Bring your lunch — eating while you code is positively encouraged. The first session is next Wednesday, so there is no time to lose.

Who is it for? You. Seriously — everyone is welcome, from total beginners to people who already code at home. We will split into small groups so nobody feels lost or held back. The only rule is curiosity.

What do I need? Just yourself. Laptops are provided, and all the software is free and already installed. You do not need to buy anything or download anything in advance.

How do I join? Easy. Add your name to the sign-up sheet on the door of Computer Lab 2, or scan the QR code on the poster beside this notice. Spaces are limited to twenty per session, so sign up early to make sure you get a place.

Bring a friend, bring an idea, or just bring yourself and see what you can make. We cannot wait to see you there.

Coding Club — Wednesdays, 1:00 pm, Computer Lab 2. Sign up now.

The Day We Raised £1,200 (and I Lost a Shoe)

So. Sports Day. I went in expecting the usual: a damp field, a whistle, and the slow death of my dignity in the 800 metres. What I got instead was the best afternoon of the term — and yes, one missing trainer. Let me explain.

It started, as all good chaos does, with a plan that was too ambitious. Our form had signed up for the charity relay, which sounds simple until you realise the 'baton' was a rubber chicken and the final leg had to be run in a giant inflatable dinosaur costume. Guess who volunteered for the dinosaur. Guess who could not see, breathe, or run in a straight line inside it. Correct.

But here is the thing about Sports Day that nobody tells you: it is not actually about winning. It is about the moment your whole form is screaming your name as you sprint — sweating, half-blind, dressed as a Tyrannosaurus — toward a finish line you genuinely cannot locate. We came third. We did not care. We were too busy laughing.

And it was for something real. Every lap, every silly costume, every overpriced cupcake from the bake sale added up. By the time the head teacher announced the total over the loudspeaker — £1,200 for the local food bank — the whole field went quiet, then erupted. That is a number with actual weight behind it. That is meals on tables.

I will be honest: I cried a little. Then I realised I had lost a shoe somewhere on the back straight, hopped over to find it, and fell into the long jump pit in front of three hundred people. Worth it.

So if you sat this one out, or watched from the stands with your headphones in — next year, get involved. Wear the ridiculous costume. Run the pointless relay. Buy the cupcake. Because the photos are funny, the medals are forgettable, but the afternoon you spent making your whole year laugh while raising real money? That one sticks.

See you on the start line. Bring spare shoes.

Dear Mrs Okonkwo,

I am writing to ask you to consider extending the school library's opening hours so that it remains open after school until 6 pm. I make this request on behalf of many students who, I believe, would benefit greatly from a quiet, supported place to work in the hours after lessons end.

I understand that the current hours reflect real constraints — staffing, supervision and cost are not small matters, and I do not raise this lightly. But I would ask you to weigh those constraints against a need that I think is genuine and growing.

For many of us, home is not a place where serious study is easy. Younger siblings, shared rooms, unreliable internet and long commutes all make the hours straight after school the very hours when concentration is hardest to find. The library offers exactly what those homes cannot: silence, space, reference books and a desk. Closing it at 3:30 pm removes that resource at precisely the moment it is most needed.

There is also the matter of fairness. Students who can afford tutors or have quiet homes already have somewhere to work. Those who do not are left without options. An extended library would not advantage the few; it would level the field for the many — which is, I know, something this school genuinely cares about.

I am also conscious of practicality, and I would not ask for the impossible. Perhaps the extension could begin as a trial on two or three evenings a week, staffed in part by sixth-form volunteers under a member of staff. If demand proves low, nothing is lost; if it proves high, the case will have made itself.

I would be very grateful if you would consider this proposal, and I would welcome the chance to discuss it further — perhaps with a short survey of students to gauge the demand. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for the many ways the school already supports our learning.

Yours sincerely, A. Mensah Year 12

Q1(b) reflective commentary excerpt (AO3):

To suit my audience — the head teacher, an authority figure — I sustained a formal, courteous register throughout, opening with the verb 'ask' softened to 'consider' rather than a blunt demand, so that the request reads as respectful rather than entitled. Because my purpose was to persuade a sceptical reader, I structured the letter to concede before I argued: the second paragraph acknowledges the 'real constraints' of 'staffing, supervision and cost', and the subordinating conjunction 'But' then pivots the reader toward my case. This concession is intended to position me as reasonable, so that the persuasion that follows is trusted rather than resisted. I built my strongest argument — fairness — in the middle, and lowered the cost of agreement at the end by proposing a limited 'trial', a hedging strategy designed to make the request feel safe to grant.

Switch It Off: Why One Phone-Free Evening Might Be the Best Thing You Do All Week

Be honest. When did you last go a whole evening without checking your phone? Not an hour. Not until you got bored. A whole evening. If you cannot remember — and most of us cannot — then this article is for you.

We are not here to lecture you. Your phone is brilliant. It is your camera, your music, your group chat, your map, your everything. Nobody is asking you to throw it in a river. We are asking for one evening. Just one, once a week. And here is why it might surprise you.

You will get time back. The average teenager spends around seven hours a day on a screen. Seven. That is not a typo. Reclaim a single evening and you have handed yourself three or four hours you did not know you had — to read, draw, cook, train, talk, or do gloriously nothing.

Your brain gets a break. Constant notifications keep you in a low hum of alertness, waiting for the next ping. Switch off and that hum fades. People who try a phone-free evening report sleeping better and feeling calmer — not because phones are evil, but because silence is rare and your mind needs it.

You might actually connect. There is something different about a conversation where nobody is half-looking at a screen. Try one. Eat dinner with your family and leave the phones in another room. It is awkward for about ninety seconds. Then it is the best part of the week.

So here is the challenge. Pick an evening. Tell a friend you are doing it so you cannot quietly cheat. Put the phone in a drawer — not face-down on the table, in a drawer — and see what happens. The world will not end. Your group chat will survive without you. And you might just discover that the most interesting thing in the room was never on the screen.

One evening. That is all. Switch it off — and see what switches on.

The train sets me down before the city is properly awake, and for a few minutes I have it almost to myself. Dawn here does not arrive so much as seep — a pale, uncertain light that lifts the rooftops out of the dark one ridge at a time, as if the city were being remembered rather than lit.

The station forecourt is wet, though it has not rained; it is the particular dampness of a place that has just exhaled the night. A man in a grey coat is hosing the pavement outside a shuttered café, and the water runs in slow silver veins toward a drain, carrying with it a single torn ticket and the smell of stone. Somewhere behind a wall, a radio plays something I do not recognise, low and unhurried, the music of a city that has not yet decided to be loud.

I walk because there is nothing else to do, and walking is how an unfamiliar place gives itself up. The streets are narrow and lean toward one another at the top, so that the strip of sky between them is the colour of old pewter. Shutters begin, reluctantly, to lift. A baker's window warms gold from within, the first decisive colour of the morning, and the scent that reaches the street is so frank, so generous, that it feels almost like a welcome — though of course it is not; the city has not noticed me at all.

That, I think, is the quiet pleasure of arriving early. For one suspended hour you are a witness rather than a participant, granted the privilege of watching a place become itself before it remembers to perform. The waiters have not yet set out the chairs; the postcards are still in their boxes; nobody is selling anything. The city is, briefly, only what it is.

By the time the first bells ring — uneven, overlapping, a conversation rather than a chime — the light has hardened into day and the spell is already lifting. Shutters are up; voices arrive; a scooter tears the silence cleanly in two. I find a table, order coffee I cannot yet name, and watch the city put on its public face. I have seen it without it. That, more than any monument, is what I came for.

Q1(b) reflective commentary excerpt (AO3):

For a discerning adult readership I chose a restrained, precise register, trusting the reader to feel an effect without being instructed in it: I preferred understatement ('the quiet pleasure of arriving early') to exclamation, and allowed the imagery to carry the emotion. My central method was sustained personification — the city 'seep[s]', 'exhales', 'becomes itself', 'remembers to perform' — a controlled metaphorical thread intended to make the place feel like a living thing slowly waking, which suits the descriptive purpose of evoking rather than reporting. I deliberately layered sensory detail (the visual 'pewter' sky, the olfactory 'smell of stone' and bread, the auditory bells 'uneven, overlapping') and ordered the piece around a single movement — from emptiness to the return of the crowd — so that the structure itself enacts the dawn it describes.

Good evening. Thank you for coming — and thank you, especially, to those of you who came already doubtful. You are exactly the people I need to talk to.

Let me begin by saying that your scepticism is reasonable. You have heard proposals before. You have watched well-meaning schemes swallow money and then quietly disappear, leaving nothing but a sign and a hole in the budget. So when someone stands up and says, 'Let us turn the old car park into a garden,' you are right to fold your arms and ask: who pays, and who keeps it alive when the enthusiasm fades? Those are not awkward questions. They are the only questions that matter, and I will answer them plainly.

Who pays? Not you — not in new taxes. The conversion is funded by a grant already secured and ring-fenced for green community projects; it cannot be spent on anything else. If we do not use it here, we lose it entirely. The choice is not between a garden and your money. It is between a garden and an empty car park that already costs us to maintain.

Who keeps it alive? This is the question that truly decides it, and here I will not pretend. A garden tended by no one becomes a wasteland faster than tarmac ever could. So this proposal does not ask you to fund a garden. It asks you to build a community that wants one. The plans set aside plots for residents, for the school, for the lunch club. Upkeep is not a cost we pay; it is a thing we do, together, on a Saturday morning.

I know what an empty car park is. I have walked past it for eleven years. It is grey, and it is silent, and it asks nothing of us — which is precisely why it gives us nothing back.

I am not asking you to believe in a vision. I am asking you to back a plan that is funded, costed and answerable. Come to the trial open day. Walk the site. Bring your doubts with you — and then decide. If we are wrong, you will have lost an afternoon. If we are right, this street gets something it has not had in a generation: a reason to stop, and stay, and talk.

Thank you.