STUDENTS from Pershore High School were praised for their security skills after impressing judges with their code-cracking abilities at a UK final.
Alice Forson, Milly Routledge, Lucy Inett and Ella Ramage represented the Station Road school as team ‘ATeam’ at the historic Lancaster House in London on Monday (March 27) at the final of the CyberFirst Girls competition.
The competition, organised by the National Cyber Security Centre, was created to raise more awareness of careers in cyber security amongst girls, because only 10 per cent of the global workforce is female.
The final transformed Lancaster House into a live-action cyber centre to test the girls’ security skills through a series of challenging scenarios.
By reaching the final, the team from Pershore High finished in the top 0.5 per cent of the 8,000 entrants, and took part in a day of digital investigation to unravel a fictional mystery which had seen a fictional school website hacked.
After they worked their way through a series of challenges to find clues, they presented their findings to a panel of industry champions, including Miriam González the Inspiring Girls International’s founder, TalkTalk’s chief executive Dido Harding, Sian John, Symantec’s chief strategist, and Jacqueline de Rojas TechUK’s president, who found Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School to be the winners.
Pershore High student Lucy Inett said: “The thing we enjoyed most about the competition was the introduction to a new world and knowledge level, especially how much we all learnt.
“We really enjoyed working as a girls team. The teamwork and friendship level really helped us with the competition as a whole.
“The competition has really opened our eyes to a whole new career choice. We went into this competition not knowing hardly anything and from the challenges we have come away knowing so much more than we did before.”
Alison Whitney, the deputy director for digital services at the NCSC, said: “The girls from Worcestershire were all very worthy finalists – the standard of work was incredibly high and we were very impressed with their work.
“Having worked in cyber security for over a decade I would recommend working in cyber security to any young woman hoping to make a positive impact on the world.”
