14-18 February

Chess Grandmaster Back at Bolton School

This week has been an exciting final week of term as Nigel Short, the UK's most renowned chess player, returned to Bolton School to help celebrate one hundred years of competitive chess at the school. Having left the independent day school in 1981 as a child prodigy and the youngest International Chess Master in history, he went on to become Britain's strongest Chess Grandmaster of the twentieth century. He returned today to talk to pupils about his meteoric rise in the chess world and about his recollections of life at Bolton School, and following his talk, he simultaneously played thirty of the School's best junior chess players in the Great Hall. Nigel will return to Bolton School tomorrow to play a further simultaneous display against thirty local junior chess players in an event organised by Manchester Chess Federation.

The sixth Bolton and Bury Business Awards were launched this week and Bolton School is proud to be a sponsor for the second year running. The School will sponsor one of the new categories this year - We're backing Bolton and Bury - which recognises businesses which, through their success, have not only secured publicity and profit for themselves but have helped to raise the profile of the Bolton or Bury boroughs. There are 11 award categories and judges will choose the overall winners from a shortlist of finalists in each category. The winners will be announced at a ceremony at the De Vere Whites Hotel at the Reebok Stadium on Thursday 16 June where Steve Davis OBE will be the guest speaker.

If you find yourself in Bolton’s Marketplace shopping centre take a look at the artwork of our Year 6 boys who have an exhibition of landscape paintings on the top floor of the centre. The paintings make a colourful display with scenes ranging from beaches, countryside, the sea, mountains and waterfalls.

And the Senior Girls have also been impressing this week as nine Year 7 girls showed nerves of steel by competing in front of the whole year group in a French Spelling Bee Competition. The pupils were already winners, having won their respective French Spelling Bee form challenges in the run up to Christmas but were competing to see which four of them would go on to represent the Girls' Division in the regional final, to be held at Manchester Metropolitan University next term. The winners of the regional heat then go on to a national final. Also in Senior Girls, Dr Fiona Edmonds, a lecturer at Cambridge University, returned to her old school to give the Sixth Form and Year 11 students a talk on Lancashire's Medieval History as part of their Gifted and Talented programme.