On the 12th May, several Year 9 students attended the Graduation Event at Sheffield University as the final part of their course in the Scholars Programme.

The Scholar’s Programme is an opportunity for students to learn a new topic outside of the standard curriculum, being taught and guided by a PhD Tutor, mimicking university-style teaching. The title of the topic was ‘All is fair in love and war – Looking into the importance of International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions’, and at the end of this course, the students were tasked to write a 2,000 word essay about the legal importance of IHL and the Geneva Conventions to demonstrate how much they have learnt from the course.

These students were then invited to the Graduation Event at Sheffield as their reward for their hard work. The event included a reflection of the Programme, a campus tour around Sheffield University and the main part of it, the Graduation Ceremony. The Ceremony offered these Year 9s the opportunity to celebrate their successes in the Programme whether it was what grade they got for the essay, seeing what other schools learnt about, and the main celebration was receiving a certificate as a symbol of these successes. Alongside the certificate, two Year 9 students: Joyce from 9 Fisher and Zach from 9 Clitheroe were nominated to be Spokes-Scholars, talking and discussing through individual speeches about their personal experiences and challenges in the Scholars Programme.

A huge congratulations to these Year 9 students for working incredibly hard during this programme and achieving very strong results and grades from their essays!