Millfield's Successful Performance at Physics Olympiad

Twenty-six Millfield GCSE and A level students entered the challenging Physics Olympiad exams before the Easter break.

For the British Physics Olympiad, students need to solve Physics problems in a grueling one-hour exam, including calculating angles between projectiles, x-ray crystallography and locating sonic booms from fighter jets. The Olympiad is hosted by the University of Oxford.

Barney in Lower Sixth and George in Year 11 were amongst the top achievers of the challenge, winning gold certificates and respectively placing them in the top 15% nationally. Year 9 student Kieran entered the GCSE competition two years younger than other competitors and gained a silver certificate. All other students certified which lead to an impressive thirteen silver medals.

Many of our students have been attending extra weekly classes to help their development tackling tricky problems to prepare. The challenges were adapted this year due to lockdown restrictions; students had sixty minutes to answer forty challenging multiple-choice calculations and logical problems.

Millfield supports its pupils in a large number of external competitions, including Olympiads in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Linguistics and Informatics, the Intermediate and Senior Mathematics Challenges, the Millfield Maths Challenge, the Naval Engineering Challenge, the English Speaking Union Public Speaking competition, European Youth Parliament, Model United Nations, Bank of England Target 2.0, the Omnibus Translation Competition, and essay prizes offered by Oxford and Cambridge colleges.