Our bespoke Socrates Programme is in its second year and the range and quality of projects produced by our y7-9 scholars is truly inspiring. On Thursday 20 June the Longton Hall was buzzing with friends and families who came to view the 43 projects from this year’s cohort. All the scholars had worked incredibly hard on choosing, researching and producing their projects and it is also such a joy to see the variety of topics that pupils choose to work on.

The idea behind the programme is to stimulate a lifelong love of learning and to follow Socratic teaching in terms of giving pupils questions, not answers, and modeling an inquiring, probing mind. Each pupil attends lectures throughout the year by various inspirational people including alumna and entrepreneur, Jacynth Bassett, Editor Jo Elvin, physicist Dr Jess Wade among others, as well as a workshop with author and lecturer Christopher Lloyd, who challenged the girls to draw a historical timeline to connect the history of nature and humanity into a single sweeping narrative.

Our guest speaker was author, lecturer and former teacher, Martin Robinson. He was very impressed with the range of projects and emphasised the importance of continuing to question what we know and what we don’t know in order to learn. He also spoke to us about Socrates versus Artificial Intelligence and the importance of maintaining humanity in the face of increasing knowledge of machines and the threat of potential replacement of teachers-and even pupils-by robots! It was very thought provoking indeed.

The projects were so strong that there had to be joint winner in some categories!

Winners List:
Year 7
1st Darcey Hill (made a costume for a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
2nd JOINT – Hope Skinner (wrote a play in Shakespearean language) and Isabella Dutton (Scuba Diving)
3rd JOINT – Francesca Ratcliffe (Women in Journalism) and Elena Aristidou (Greek Cookbook)

Year 8
1st Tiffany Igharoro (Sperox, an app to help donate money to the homeless)
2nd Grace Pappas (Embroidery – sparked by her great, great, great grandmothers embroidery of the alphabet)
3rd Ella McGovern (the 4th dimension)

Year 9
1st Eve Griffiths (portfolio of different portraits)
2nd Maia Evans (computer programme on Greek mythology)
3rd Lilly Russell (mental health)
Headmistress’s Commendation Ruby Gratrick (plastic pollution)