2016 Autumn Term

On Saturday, 10th December, after morning lessons and afternoon matches, the girls from School House, St Prisca's and St Cecilia's got into their loveliest mufti to head out to the Bristol Hippodrome to watch the pantomime Cinderella, starring Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean as the Fairy Godparents. 

On Tuesday 6th December, Sir Francis Richards, a former Director of GCHQ, delivered a fascinating lecture about the history of code breaking and Bletchley Park during and after the Second World War. Made more famous by the 2014 film The Imitation Game, Enigma and Bletchley Park have really caught the popular consciousness in recent years.

The UVI members of the St Mary’s Calne Wine Society gathered last week for a festive celebration to mark the end of term and the impending Christmas break.

The British Informatics Olympiad (BIO) is a national competition where students are faced with three, fiendishly difficult problem solving challenges which they need to complete in less than three hours. The main marks are to be gained by the students programming their solutions and so it was a great opportunity for the fledgling Computer Scientists in LV and UV to flex their programming muscles. Impressively, entrants also included mathematicians without any programming knowledge.

This week, St Mary’s Sixth Form Physics students were delighted to welcome Professor Alan Barr from Merton College, Oxford University. We are very excited to be part of the Higgs Hunters project which will see us analysing data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN which discovered the Higgs particle in 2012.

On the evening of Saturday 3rd December, the girls from School House, St Cecilia's and St Prisca's participated in an attempt in Calne to break the Guinness World record for the largest live nativity gathering.

Saturday, 3rd December was a beautiful, clear winter’s day – the perfect setting for the wonderful Confirmation Service that was held that morning. There was frost on the ground outside, but inside the church it was, thankfully, warm.

On the evening of Monday 28th November, St Mary's Dissection Club gathered together in the Science Lab for the horse leg dissection.

The annual Moberly Company Supper took place on 30th November. The theme was 'Wacky and tacky and a touch of tartan' to celebrate St Andrew's day.

On Monday 28th November, we hosted the Bath and District heat of the English-Speaking Union's Churchill National Public Speaking Competition.

On Wednesday 23rd November, 20 St Mary's Sixth Form Philosophy and Ethics students went to an AIM conference in central London, with key speakers Professors Richard Dawkins and Richard Swinburne. It was a very popular conference, with hundreds of Sixth Formers in attendance.

On the evening of Tuesday 29th November, for the penultimate event in our Lecture Programme this term, we were delighted to feature the second in the series of Science talks by welcoming Dr Zoe Laughlin, Co-Founder of the Institute of Making, based at University College London.