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Term 2 House Competitions

We are organising a fantastic range of events and competitions throughout the year. Many of these activities are linked to our core values; Character, Curiosity, Compassion, Creativity. This term we focused on ‘Compassion’, by running a Philosophy competition, a Santa Run in aid of Katharine House Hospice, and raising funds for Aspire.

Students are excited to see how they can participate by supporting their houses and the local community. We recently held a non-uniform day during which staff and students were invited to wear clothes matching their school house colours and raised £739.95 for local charity, Thrive.

The annual Santa Run is always a fun and challenging event. Students were asked to run around the school field 3 times wearing a Santa hat as a charity fundraiser for Katharine House Hospice in Banbury. So far, we have raised over £700 for this special organisation. On the last day of term, students will be invited to come into school wearing a seasonal Christmas jumper to raise funds for Aspire, a local charity that supports people in Oxfordshire facing homelessness and disadvantage.

An impressive number of students entered our first Philosophy house competition, with particular interest from KS3 students, and it made judging very tough indeed. In the end, Mr Dye arrived at three winners and three runners-up, from each of the learning cohorts. Each cohort had a variety of puzzles and paradoxes to respond to. The KS3 question ‘The experience machine: the ultimate virtual reality PlayStation lets you plug yourself in and be happy all the time. However, it wipes your memory and you can never unplug. Would you plug in?’ was won by Naomi Boddy (7TW).
The KS4 question ‘Digital dignity: computers are getting smarter all the time, and at some point they will be as clever as us or more so. When should we start treating machines like human beings, with their own rights and freedoms?’ was won by Florence Pearce (10AJP). The KS5 question ‘Brains… A philosophical zombie is a physical duplicate of a person, but with no inner mental life. They look and act like you and I, but inside they are on auto-pilot. How would you know that the person next to you was real?’ was won by Flo Mantell (12BMG).

Congratulations to all our winners and also to our runners-up, Grace Harrison, Morgan Williams and Aaron Denton. You can read the students’ answers to these philosophical questions on the school’s facebook page.

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