Best Schools - The Royal Masonic School for Girls crowned winners of national CyberFirst competition

Four girls from RMS for Girls in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire have beaten competition from all over the UK to be crowned winners of a GCHQ contest to address gender imbalances in cyber security. The winning team comprised of four Year 8 students (Alexa Wolff, Angelina Paz-King, Hattie Simpson, Laura Ferguson) saved the day of a fictitious company, coming out on top after 12,000 girls took part in head-scratching challenges of ‘CyberFirst Girls’, which is organised by GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The RMS team, alongside finalists from nine other schools, enjoyed an exclusive dinner at Edinburgh Castle on the eve of the competition.

Throughout the final, the girls worked as security professionals to investigate an ongoing cyber incident. After analysing the potential breach, the winning team had to present their findings to a panel of experts from GCHQ and the NCSC before suggesting an effective resolution to save the day.

Over the past three years, over 24,000 girls in schools across the UK have participated in the NCSC’s CyberFirst Girls competition of problem-solving and code cracking challenges to crown the UK’s most cyber-capable young women.

Further information regarding the CyberFirst Girls competition can be found here: https://www.cyberfirst.ncsc.gov.uk/

Private tutoring of children has become widespread, but the most ambitious parents are upping the stakes by booking tutors for themselves to understand their offspring’s homework.

A revamp of the curriculum has left many parents bewildered by fronted adverbials, quadratic sequences and the role of the omniscient narrator.

Now a company is offering tutors to help them to comprehend modern teaching methods. For £40 an hour, parents will be brought up to scratch and given the confidence to oversee their children’s homework.

Critics said that the initiative was likely to increase angst among parents.

Tutor House set up the service after conducting a survey of 2,500 parents which found that more than two thirds did not understand their child’s homework. Of these, half worried that they were hindering their child’s education by trying to help.

Helen Pike, master of Magdalen College School in Oxford, said that tuition for parents was unnecessary and could even be harmful. “Tutoring is a market which feeds on parental anxiety. So now parents will become more anxious that other parents are being tutored to be better parents than they are,” she said. “All schools I know do excellent talks for parents and are there to support them in partnership in doing what is best for their children.”