WELCOME

Geoffrey Stanford Head

It is a pleasure to be able to introduce this latest edition of the ONA magazine, shining a spotlight on Computer Science at the RGS. When I arrived at the school in 2019, Computer Science was very much in its infancy as a standalone academic department, having just become a separate discipline from our Engineering Design and Technology department. In my time, it has grown to three teachers working through all year groups and offering GCSE and A-Level. There is a real sense of energy and enthusiasm clearly apparent whenever one sees what is going on in their lessons.

Away from the classroom, teams from the RGS have achieved impressive results reaching regional and national finals in competitions ranging from Cyber Centurion and CyberFirst Girls through to the LEGO League which entails programming LEGO robots to achieve complex tasks. At the time of writing, in the last couple of weeks we have had 188 pupils qualify for the second round of the Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC). Two of our Junior teams achieved the maximum possible score and 30 students reached the top 10% in the competition, and are now through to the next national stage. We have also had teams achieve maximum possible score in the Perse Coding Challenge as well as reaching the national finals of the Vex Robotics national championships.

In addition to the inspirational work done with our own pupils, the Computer Science team have delivered an extraordinary number of Digital Schoolhouse sessions to our partnership State schools around the region. Indeed, such has been the level of demand for these sessions that we are currently looking for funding for a Computer Science Partnership Teacher to work in parallel with the Maths and Physics Partnership Teachers, already funded by the Reece Foundation and the Robotics Partnership Teacher, kindly funded by British Engines.

These Partnership Teachers not only work with gifted and talented children – currently around 7,500 each year –but also help to upskill non specialist teachers in maintained sector schools. In doing so, they are playing a key part in our aim of helping to raise aspirations and attainment across the North East. Separately, as Paul Hudspith has noted, it was a great loss recently to hear news of the death of one of my predecessors, Alister Cox. He had served as Headmaster of the RGS for 22 years from 1972. Although this is not quite as long as Hugh Moises who held the role for 38 years back in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it is nonetheless an extraordinary length of service to the school. He returned to visit only last year and I felt privileged to have a couple of long conversations with him about the school in his time and how it has evolved since. I have no doubt that he will be missed by so many of those generations who passed through the RGS, under his leadership.