On Thursday 8 December 2011, a team of staff and students were invited to represent Great Barr School at a prestigious awards ceremony at Birmingham’s ThinkTank.

The Birmingham Mail School Awards 2011, sponsored by Palasades Shopping Centre and other local business, recognises the sterling efforts of school staff and pupils across the city.

Hundreds of schools competed for 8 awards. Great Barr School got through to the final two schools in the category ‘Best School Website of Newspaper’. Unfortunately, Small Heath School’s pupil newspaper, which is published three times a year, pipped us to the post – congratulations, Small Heath!

We’re very proud of our School website which is among the best school websites in the country. The website has become an incredibly important means of communication with our students, parents and community. We’re a huge school with 2,400 students and 300 staff. There are many great things happening across the School. If it weren’t for the website, some of those great things could get lost in the noise. We want to shout about the successes of all of our students and staff and we want people to hear. The website has proved to be an excellent way of getting our message out to a large audience.

And of course, we have two other websites – our iCommunities site and our dedicated Sixth Form Website.

We were also nominated for ‘School of the Year’. Though we didn’t win, we couldn’t have been more pleased to see our friends at Greenholm School take the top prize. For some years now we’ve been working closely with Greenholm, particularly on our outstanding Sierra Leone twinning project.

The ceremony, hosted by Ed James of Heart FM, included a soft drinks reception in one of the ThinkTank’s galleries, a lovely dinner and all of the children got to take away a goodie bag.

We had a great day and though we were the runner up in our category, it was a great achievement to get into the final few among hundreds of other schools.

It just goes to show, Great Barr is among the top in the class!