presentation

Presentation Evening 2023

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Our annual presentation evening is a great event in the Academy’s calendar. The evening celebrates the achievements of our highest-performing students, the crème-de-la-crème of Churchill’s excellent student body. Quite rightly, the main focus of the evening is on academic success, and in particular those students who have distinguished themselves in their public examinations, both at GCSE and at A-level. But we recognise that a school is about more than just the examination results that young people achieve, so we were also really proud award prizes for service to the community, for progress and improvement, for compassion, for resilience, and for attitudes to learning, all of which often go hand in hand with academic success. This dedication to developing the whole person, academically and personally, is at the heart of our mission and purpose here at Churchill Academy & Sixth Form.

I often speak to our students about why we are here; why our school exists; what our purpose is. Based on our three core values of kindness, curiosity and determination, we have set ourselves the goal of inspiring and enabling all our young people to make a positive difference both in their time at the Academy and, perhaps more importantly, when they leave us. We aim that the young people who go through Churchill Academy & Sixth Form will go out into the world with the knowledge, skills, character and confidence to make the world a better place. Some of them will do it in small ways, others will change it in ways we can’t even imagine yet, but we are incredibly proud of the young people who attend our Academy and who are celebrated at Presentation Evening.

I was absolutely delighted to be joined this year by two guest presenters on stage, to help me hand out the prizes. Both of them gave fantastic speeches to inspire our audience of prize winners and supporters.

Our first guest of honour was Meg Abernethy-Hope. I taught Meg A-level Media Studies in my final years as Deputy Headteacher at Chew Valley School. Meg was always a wonderful student, with the kind of confident fearlessness that inspires everyone around her. Meg was already modelling when she was at school, and has gone on to a successful career as a model and an actress. But it is Meg’s activism that has come to define her work. As co-founder of The Billy Chip, she turned a personal and family tragedy into a force for social good. Meg presented the Academy & Community prizes, before giving a fantastic account of her experiences at school and beyond, and how the Academy’s values of kindness, curiosity and determination helped her through the many challenges which she has faced, and guided her to the incredible achievements she has already accomplished. We look forward to her forthcoming TED talk!

Our second guest was Anna Jones. Anna was a recipient of a prize at Presentation Evening 2016, when she was a student at Churchill. Anna went on to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge, and is now studying for a Doctorate at Wolfson College, Oxford in the long term Ecology lab. Anna is investigating how ground level ozone exposure affects tree health and growth, using a combination of satellite data, spectroscopy and individual tree physiology to understand how ozone damage scales from local to global vegetation. Anna joined me to present the academic prizes and awards based on this year’s exam results, before giving a wonderful speech of her own about her time at Churchill and in academia, where she now climbs into forest canopies to collect data on the impact of ozone on tree health – relying on skills she first encountered on work experience in Year 10 at the Academy!

It was wonderful to see our students celebrated in this way, and I look forward to the bright futures they all have ahead of them. You can see a full list of this year’s prize winners, and the Celebration of Success Roll of Honour, alongside an archive of past winners, on the prize winners page of the Academy website.

Presentation Evening 2022

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Churchill’s Annual Presentation Evening took place on Wednesday 14th September 2022 – three years since our last in-person event. The evening celebrated the successes of the Academy community over the previous year, with awards focused on the exam results from Years 11 and 13 complemented by prizes for service to the community, for progress and improvement, compassion, resilience, and attitudes to learning. 

I was joined on stage by the Chair of Trustees, Mrs Anne Oakley, who introduced the evening. Our guest of honour was William Bjergfelt, cyclist with Team GB and competitor in the Tour of Britain. As a (very amateur!) cyclist myself, I have always enjoyed cycling at the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, the Tour de France and Tour of Britain – those athletes are idols to me, so meeting William was a real honour. He gave a great speech about his own experiences in competitive sport, and how his own career has been defined by our Academy value of determination. As an elite mountain bike rider and aspiring road racer, William was involved in a head-on collision with a car in 2015 which left him with a bleed on the brain and his right leg shattered into 25 pieces. His leg was reconstructed with three titanium plates but he was told at the time he would never ride a bike again, let alone race one. William spoke to the audience of prize winners and their families about how his mental attitude was every bit as important as his physical recovery, as he defied the odds to return to elite cycling. He qualified as a para-cyclist for Team GB and returned to racing alongside able-bodied athletes in the Tour of Britain in 2021.

William’s inspiring message capped off a wonderful evening of awards – the full roll of honour can be seen on the Prize Winners page of our website. The Headteachers’ award for achievement at GCSE went to Maddie Pole, and the Captain G. J. Picton-Davies Cup for Best Overall Performance at A-level, was handed to Sarah Browne, who, with 3 A* and 1 A and will be going on to study Chemistry at New College, Oxford.

We were also delighted to award the Barry Wratten Prize for Resilience, for the second time, to Jamie Campbell. Jamie received the award for the first time in 2019, when he received it from the wheelchair he needed to move around the Academy at the time. Now in the Sixth Form, and following many years of surgery and hard work, Jamie walked up the steps unaided to collect the award from the stage. His example of determination was warmly applauded by everyone present.

Celebrating success

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This Wednesday was our annual Presentation Evening. This fantastic event is the partner to our end-of-year Celebration of Success evenings, with the focus on those students who have excelled in their GCSE and A-level exam results over the summer. However, we recognise that school is about more than just the examination results that young people achieve, so it is also vital that we award prizes for service to the community, for progress and improvement, for compassion, for resilience, and above all for excellent and improved attitudes to learning over the course of the last year.

This year’s guest of honour was the wonderful Stefanie Martini. Stefanie was a student at Churchill from 2002 to 2009, leaving us to pursue an Art Foundation course, before applying to RADA to pursue acting. From there, Stefanie landed a role as Mary Thorne in Julian Fellowes’ Doctor Thorne for ITV, as well as the mysterious Lady Ev in the NBC fantasy series Emerald City, set in the world of the Wizard of Oz. She is perhaps best known for playing the role of a young Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect 1973, showing us the origins as a probationary police officer of the iconic Detective Inspector Tennison that Dame Helen Mirren brought to ITV in the 1990s. Her latest film, Hurricane, tells the story of Squadron 303, a group of Polish airmen who fought with the RAF in the Battle of Britain, fighting both prejudice on the ground as well as the Luftwaffe in the air. It is in cinemas now!

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Prize winners with Stefanie Martini, 12th September 2018

Stefanie spoke about her time at Churchill, and how it shaped the character that she has become. She explained how, when she fell behind with school work, she was supported and pushed to get back on track, and how failing to get the part she wanted in the school musical made her a better actress. There was a thread of steely determination running through her speech: despite being rejected seven times in one year from drama schools, she kept going – and in the next year, she was accepted to four different drama schools at once. Her message of self-belief, strength of character and the importance of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone in order to move forward was hugely inspiring to the young people (and the adults!) at the event.

It’s great to have alumni back at Churchill to speak to this year’s prize-winners. Not only does it show our current and only-just-left students what is possible with a Churchill education, but it is also a great opportunity to celebrate the success of students who – although they have left – always remain part of our school community.

Of course, a prize-giving ceremony can only have one prize winner in each category. Even though we gave out 139 prizes at this year’s Presentation Evening, there are hundreds, even thousands, of achievements, triumphs and successes that we don’t have a prize for, that don’t get their picture in the paper or their name in the newsletter. What I hope, however, is that we do recognise and celebrate those successes, however small, whenever and wherever we find them – because nobody ever tires of being told “well done.”