Science week has been particularly active at Pinner High School this year. The official theme of the week this year is growth.  Our Year 7 students have therefore been busy growing bacteria which they have been regularly analysing.  Our Year 12s were involved with a workshop run by the University of Oxford all about the biological molecules and their applications.  This included finding out more about the chemistry of COVID-19.  This encompassed Biology, Chemistry and Medicine, stretching many of our most able students. Years 8 and 10 continued with the theme of growth, this time looking at growing cities and Engineering – they joined our Sixth Form Engineering group in building spaghetti bridges. During the week we launched the whole school element hunt; students have been finding elements around school and finding out facts about them. Our future medics spent a day taking part in a conference run by Oxford High School hearing talks given by a huge range of different healthcare professionals.  There was a keynote talk given by Professor Andrew Carr, the Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Oxford.

And still there is more! Year 8 and 9 students took part in talks given by science writer and journalist, Colin Stuart.  Colin has written 19 books all about space, selling close to 500,000 copies.  He is most famous for the books that he has written alongside Astronaut Tim Peake.  He spoke about what the first human missions to Mars will be like.  Students were of course fascinated by everything but in particular the challenges of going to the toilet in space! You may have seen our daily Science week tweets about amazing scientific facts.

Elsewhere in school, Food Technology students were delighted that Bridget Earley from 'Meat Like It Used To Be' came to visit to demonstrate professional poultry jointing. This was a huge success, and we are very grateful for her support.

Year 9 Design students are at the V&A museum today and will return with renewed inspired for their GCSE projects.

And we have our first tadpoles in the school pond!