News Crest For Success! 13.10.2025

Collyer’s students have celebrated yet another successful year of CREST awards, having achieved an incredible nine prizes, including seven Gold, and two Silver for 2025. The outstanding work submitted by the students received extremely positive feedback from the award assessors, who commented that the projects were: “Exceptional – from the initial idea, through planning, analysis of [their] results and [their] conclusions, every step is well thought through and very well presented.”

CREST awards reward the work of students which explore real-world STEM projects and can take up to 70 hours of diligent work to carry out. Over the last academic year, Collyer’s students relentlessly worked on their projects during and outside of enrichment time, thoroughly researching their topics which included studying the impact of kidney dialysis on patients, using numerical methods to model n-body problems, and even analysing candles with different coloured flames! The projects require a huge amount of effort and determination to carry out from beginning to end, and the college is extremely proud of the students for their achievements.

Joint Head of Biology at Collyer’s, Caroline Birch, who is in charge of running the CREST award enrichment, was very pleased: “We are incredibly proud of the students’ hard work and commitment to these independent projects. They have developed and demonstrated fantastic creativity, problem solving skills and motivation and we are incredibly pleased to see their hard work recognised.”

Rob Hussey, Collyer’s Vice Principal (Curriculum) was thrilled: “Our students used their own ideas and projects to work on independently during Collyer’s enrichment sessions. We have an excellent Biology department, and these students really are a credit to Collyer’s and their brilliant teachers.”

Collyer’s Deputy Principal Steve Martell added: “Many experts view CREST as the scientific equivalent to the Duke of Edinburgh Award, so the results announced represent an enormous achievement for our talented young scientists”.

After the successes achieved this academic year, the CREST Awards enrichment activity at Collyer’s looks forward to performing even better next year and hopes to continue celebrating the wins of even more awards in the future!

Student Reporter, Stephanie Do Carmo Gomes