Sixth Life

Students from Truro School’s Sixth Form showed an incredible breadth of talent and knowledge at the annual EPQ Showcase in March.

The EPQ, or Extended Project Qualification, is an established A-Level programme that equips students with a range of professional, academic and personal skills. Each student takes on a unique venture into a personalised area of interest and learns valuable skills in researching and referencing, discussion and creativity.

Students can select from an option of four projects: artefact, dissertation, investigation and performance, and chooses a defined area of study. Once the projects are completed, students are required to present their work to a non-specialised audience, giving them further, valuable experience in public speaking.

This year’s projects showed an incredible range of knowledge and hard work, including performance projects on ‘The Breakfast Club’ and the English Civil War, a design and build of an electric guitar that can play all genres of music and an insightful account of the media’s influence on exercise and nutrition.

The EPQ is a huge undertaking for the students. All of the staff, the audience and their peers were impressed by their confidence and determination to bring these projects to life, and in such depth. A special mention needs to go to Mrs Thurlow and Mrs Stone for their support of the EPQ project.

This Spring, our Sixth Formers held the annual Senior Charity Concert in aid of Safe Passage, a charity that helps unaccompanied child refugees to access their right to reach safety.

The event was a great success, with various talented acts performing and audiences watching both live and via the livestream at home.

Well done to all of our Sixth Formers that took part, and a big thank you to our tech team who made sure the event ran smoothly!

Upper Sixth students on the Leiths Introductory Certificate in Food and Wine spent an afternoon studying wine pairing and tasting with a professional sommelier from Leiths, gaining valuable knowledge about which wines work best with which flavours and foods.

Our Lower Sixth Drama students took to the stage in a performance evening for their friends and family. The evening was an excellent opportunity for the Lower Sixth to acquaint themselves with performing in front of an audience again before they do their A-level pieces.

It was a wonderful evening with lots of brilliant performances featuring a range of genres, which certainly kept their audience captivated. Well done to all those who took part; we look forward to seeing more performances throughout the year!

As a part of the A-Level practical Chemistry assessment, Lower 6th students conducted an organic chemistry experiment of partial oxidation of an alcohol, converting a sample of ethanol into ethanal, an aldehyde with a characteristic ‘pear-drops’ smell. They were using Quickfit apparatus, and having already used the complex set-up in a previous practical, they were highly knowledgeable and confident this time around and it was a pleasure to see them working so carefully and with attention to safety.