How The Cotswold Challenge is needed to help school and college students for the second year in a row
At the beginning of the first Lockdown in March last year, a team of self-employed professionals founded The Cotswold Challenge (TCC) to provide support and an educational initiative to 15-19 years old students who were going to miss out on their GCSE and A-Level exams.
The Cotswold Challenge team – Allison Murray of Allison Murray Design, Fiona Scott of Scott Media, Nigel Chute of Chute Design and Chris Roberts of Chris Roberts MBE PR) are astounded that they are now considering launching The Cotswold Challenge for the second year in a row!
This time last year, the small team of self-employed business professionals thought that their creation of The Cotswold Challenge would be a one-off event. Sadly, it appears that there will be no GCSEs or A-Levels again this year and it certainly looks as if the 15-19 year old students (Years 11, 12 and 13) will need something stimulating and educational to do to boost their morale and confidence. The Cotswold Challenge is a non-curriculum educational initiative, judged by professional outside assessors and will be a reward to the students whose academic schooling has suffered yet again.
The Cotswold Challenge team created challenges in three categories: Art & Design; Creative Writing and Innovation & Entrepreneurial Thinking. These will not change and will be retained for TCC2021. Each category was judged by a well-known expert. One of the expert judges in the Creative Writing category was Sarah Pinborough, who has recently had her novel, Behind Her Eyes, released as a sizzling six-part series on Netflix. The book and series are currently trending on social media with #WTFThatEnding due to the controversial, shocking and unexpected ending. TCC member, Chris Roberts, interviewed Sarah and had the interview published in What’s On Netflix.
There will be 4 top monetary prizes in each category of TCC2021 plus 4 Highly Commended prizes of book tokens. The timescale for the Challenge will be slightly different to last year, as schools have altered their timetables. So The Cotswold Challenge will launch on 1st June 2021 with a closing date of 20th July. And, this year, by popular demand, we will extend the Challenge to Swindon schools and colleges.
“There were so many success stories around the students that came out of The Cotswold Challenge last year that Nigel, Allison, Fiona and I would really like to do this again to give even more students something positive to focus on,” explained Chris.
Media guru, Fiona Scott added: “I was contacted last year by several Swindon schools and colleges that wanted to take part, so it’s great to now be able to offer them the opportunity to enter and be in with a chance of winning a monetary prize.”
To find out more about The Cotswold Challenge and its success stories, visit: www.thecotswoldchallenge.com.
To read the interview with Sarah Pinborough by Chris Roberts, visit: https://chrisrobertsmbe.co.uk/wtf-that-ending-behind-the-eyes-of-writer-sarah-pinborough/.