Yesterday our students woke up to bright sunshine shining through their windows. The warmth washed away any looming mid-week blues and everyone was full of smiles and positivity as they tucked into breakfast.

The Computer Science class had obviously come down with a particularly strong case of summer excitement as they abandoned their classroom in favour of a lesson outside in the sun. The class were working on learning how to programme using a tricky computer ‘language’ called Python, and the more relaxed setting of the lesson definitely helped keep any frustration at bay while they worked. As their programme progresses, the students will get the chance to use some of this coding to build their own websites, so yesterday’s class was a crucial stepping stone!

Once classes had finished for the day, lots of students chose to spend the afternoon enjoying the warm weather by taking a trip into Oxford city centre. Most of the students headed to the Westgate centre to buy souvenirs with Oxford university hoodies proving to be some of the most popular buys.

After dinner, Oxford university was clearly still on the students brains as lots of them attended a counsellor-led talk on how to apply to Oxbridge. Quite a few amongst our cohort are already eager to return to the college in a year or two as real Oxford students so the talk was the perfect way to answer the multitude of questions our students had. 

The talk also provided a great opportunity for students to bond with counsellors who had attended the courses they themselves want to be part of. By bedtime, not only was everyone feeling more confident in their academic choices, but there were also much stronger friendships between our counsellors and students, which is always great to see!