LEADERSHIP: BIOLOGY

V . JAYARAM

The role of subject prefect not only allows students to promote their desired subject beyond what’s taught in classrooms, but it also allows them to demonstrate their passion and interest within it. Personally, I believe that the biology prefect team and department as a whole have utilised this opportunity to the fullest, bringing in original and engaging ways to promote and spur interest across all the year groups.

‘Aperture’ : an opening or gap, a term commonly used in photography as the hole that lets light into a camera lens. This rather abstract term is now used as the title for our biology magazine,

Reading school’s first ever subject specific publication, aiming to shed light onto the aspects biology that the classroom simply doesn’t cover. The magazine is managed by the prefects, and the articles are made by the students themselves. For our first volume, we worked closely with our year 12 colleagues and brought together 10 informative, student written articles, which were edited and proofread by the biology team, ensuring that quality was not compromised. Our goal with Aperture is to provide a medium that allows students to express a love for biology and gain appreciation for their work. Not only this, but by utilising the passion presented by our writers, we hope to inspire a love for biology within students that previously may not have given it a second glance. As Aperture grows, we will introduce articles from a range of different year groups, and we hope that we manage to motivate other subjects to carry out a similar initiative, allowing all pupils to affirm their position as super-curricular students.

As prefects, we want to ensure that students are given the chance to show their love for biology outside of school. The main way we achieve this is by promoting external biology based competitions, so that students interested in participating can show their love for the subject, on a national level. One of the competitions currently being promoted is the ‘Microbiology in Schools Advisory Committee (MiSAC) UK’ annual competition, in which students from across the nation write about a chosen topic. This year, the chosen topic is vaccines and their importance. Alongside this competition, we also have the ‘unsung heroes of

science’ competition, run by Hertford college, University of Oxford. This competition involves creating two-minute videos about an unsung hero of science and why you chose to talk about them. We already have many keen students volunteering to partake in both of these incredible opportunities, and the biology prefects and the department will bring many more with time. Of course, we must have a focus on the academic aspect of student life, along with the extracurricular, so in order to support students as much as possible in their studies of biology, the biology prefects are responsible for the management of the Biology Clinic. We are determined to provide the best aid for students to understand topics in which they may struggle. With a team of supportive mentors and a vast array of resources available, we are determined to constantly aid anyone who needs help in any area of biology, from years 7-11, and we hope to build on what is already an incredible

system made for students As you can see, the role of biology prefect spreads to a vast number of different roles, and plays in with various different aspects of school life, but our ultimate goal is to support anyone with any level of interest for the subject, both outside and inside the classroom, so that biology isn’t seen simply as a passive subject, but as something far more vast and intriguing.