Prize Essays
At the start of every calendar year, students throughout the school are invited to enter an essay that might be awarded a prize at Exhibition. The student chooses the question, and asks a member of staff to sponsor them through the planning, research, and writing, of the essay. Our aim is to produce
- in the Fourth Form, a self-directed and better student;
- in the Fifth Form, a better student still;
- in the Remove, someone who knows where his intellectual journey is going and can see beyond GCSE and the ordinary curriculum;
- in the Middle Sixth, an independent learner who has become capable of successfully executing a distinctive EPQ;
- in the Upper Sixth, someone with something genuinely academic and passionate to say for himself, at university, and in the application process that gets him there.
Members of staff mark the essays α, β1, or, β2, and the student has a chance to reflect at every point on the best way to approach the topic. Teachers particularly enjoy marking these essays, as they can be as quirky, various, and imaginative, as the students themselves. Last year’s successful entries included a musical composition from a member of the Fifth Form which was also performed, an essay asking ‘What makes a rollercoaster thrilling?’, a piece on ‘Manolo Blahnik: his style compared to the style of Vincent Van Gogh and Edgar Degas’, and another with the title, ‘Is anthropology a natural science?’.