It’s no secret that women are massively under-represented when it comes to jobs in the field of cyber security and computer science. Despite women holding some of the most senior cyber security positions in companies such as Microsoft, Google and Cisco, the world of computer science is still seen by many as something of a boy’s club. At The Wilnecote School, we have some amazing and intelligent students with a real flair for computer science, something that, as Head of Department for IT and Computing, I’m particularly keen to encourage and nurture as much as possible. This feeds into our determination to change this narrative and bring more talented females into this challenging and rewarding industry.

A big part of this is looking for opportunities for our students to expand their experience of computing beyond their lessons. With this in mind, for two weeks in November, we offered our Year 8 girls the chance to take part in the CyberFirst Girls competition. This annual, national competition, organised by the National Cyber Security Centre, allows Year 8 girls to form a team of up to four students and take part in a range of challenges related to cyber security, hacking, programming and problem-solving. I was delighted to have three teams signing up to enter the competition, with all of the girls involved diving into some incredibly challenging and mind-bending tasks, using break times, lunchtimes and their own time after school to win as many points as possible. At times, the scores were going up late into the evening, a real sign of dedication!

After 10 days of digging through website code, decrypting complex instructions, defeating trolls and hacking into secure systems, the final scores were available. There were some incredible performances, both individually and as a team, with fantastic encouragement between the girls and an almost endless amount of WhatsApp messages bouncing between their team group chats as they spent their evenings helping each other out. In the end, from our three teams, named “Ctrl-Alt-Elite”, “The Botatoes” and “Rubiey”, the winning team within school was Ctrl-Alt-Elite, having completed around 200 challenges and earning a spectacular 4,020 points! There were also some impressive individual performances, the pick of which were Felicity, who contributed 1,713 points towards Ctrl-Alt-Elite’s total, and Ruby, who managed to add 1,586 points to Rubiey’s final score – that’s some serious cyber expertise!

The school is extremely proud of all of the girls who got involved and rose to meet the substantial challenge of the competition. We’ve got plenty more opportunities like this throughout the year for other student groups around school, so watch this space and we’ll look forward to seeing even more students getting involved in these other events!