Congratulations Martim (8E2) on winning the School Lunch Recipe Competition!

Over 150 students came to the Bart’s Bites kiosk at the end of February to taste both selected recipes, Chicken Briyani by Andrew (7P3) and Martim’s Chicken a Bras. They voted for their favourite dish. Both dishes were delicious and everyone enjoyed them; it was a very close match.

Their achievement will be celebrated in assembly and Chicken a Bras features on the school lunch menu this week allowing all students to experience the joy of this dish!

Well done to all those students who submitted recipes to the competition, they demonstrated much creativity, we hope they will all will keep going with their culinary interests.

Thank you the school Catering team for supporting the competition, especially Angela and Michaela for judging and preparing both dishes for tasting.

As you may have read in earlier BartholoNews, there is plenty of nature to discover around our school site – from intelligent foxes to elegant owls! Our students are always keen to learn about the species, other than humans, who are using the school site or who call it home. Some of our clubs have also been using the iNaturalist app to map biodiversity around the school and share these findings with the National Education Nature Park,

In order to better support this interest in our natural world, St Bart’s has been busy raising funds and preparing the ground for a new walkway to be laid in our Nature Reserve. This fantastic space has, in recent years, been closed for lessons and clubs due to the state of the pathways but we are delighted to say that we now have enough support to start work on completing the new pathway over the Easter holidays. This would not have been possible without the support of some fantastic local companies and organisations including Englefield Charitable Trust, Greenham Trust, Newbury Friends of the Earth, Newbury Town Council, Sewa Day, Veolia Sustainability Fund and West Berkshire Council.

As well as the financial support we have received, there has also been a brilliant effort from our Site team (with particular thanks to Cliff Guthrie!) and St Bart’s students from the Kintsugi Club, Guardians of the Living Realm Club and Friends of the Bee Club who have all been hard at work helping to remove the old rotten pathway in order for work to start. Nothing will be wasted, with the old wood being used for building bat and bird boxes.

We can’t wait to open the space fully once more and we have lots of additional plans to improve and develop the area. There is still lots of work to do but this is a major milestone! If you would like to support this initiative and donate to the project, you can still do so on the Good Exchange. We’d be so grateful for your support.

The Nature Reserve Club is open to students in all years and, particularly as the weather improves!, is a fantastic way to get outside and make a difference. Volunteering at the club can even count towards Duke of Edinburgh Awards. The group meet Mrs Johnstone by the Nature Reserve after school on a Tuesday – come and join us or speak to Mrs Johnstone if you have any questions.

Following on from a series of very successful workshops with ZoieLogic Dance company, Mrs Hoult took a group of boys to perform their final piece as part of the ManMade boys dance platform on Tuesday 4 March at the Corn Exchange in Newbury. The evening was a fantastic success and the boys performed brilliantly alongside other Primary and Secondary schools in the area.

All of the boys worked extremely hard over the last few months and it was a pleasure to watch them perform. A massive well done to ; Caleb Rees, Joe Langdon, Tom Merchant, Akshansh Gupta, Cedric Roberson, Nick Calin, Codie Evans and Jimmy Ashton.

During the Autumn Term, students from Years 8 and 9 took part in the scholarship programme that was run by The Brilliant Club. Students learned about different topics in a series of university style tutorials led by a PhD tutor in their specialist field.

Here’s what Tejas Heejebu (9C2) said, “At the start of the year we were introduced to our PhD tutor who told us more specifically about the course we would be studying, which was ‘Protecting genetic information and confidentiality: The challenges ahead’. We had 5 tutorials, which were each about different topics that could have been the main points of the essay we were going to write at the end of the programme. Tutorial one was about ‘Medical privacy’, the second was about ‘Freedom of the press’, the third about ‘Informed consent’ and the fourth about ‘Genetic information and confidentiality’. Our fifth one was preparation for the essay we were going to write over the Christmas holidays. We picked one of the topics and used it for an ethical dilemma argument. I did mine on ‘Freedom of the press’. After the Christmas holidays we got our results back in university grades and went on a trip to Christchurch College in Oxford University. Overall, it was an amazing experience.”

The photos are from the graduation day in the week before half term where students went to celebrate their hard work and dedication throughout the programme. They all did incredibly well and every student achieved either a 2:1 or a 1^st, which is outstanding. A huge well done to everyone!

Mr Hill