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11 July 2025

DHSB Summer Festival 2025


The DHSB Summer Festival 2025 was a vibrant, sun-filled celebration that brought the school community together for an afternoon of fun and fundraising. The event featured an exciting mix of activities, from a competitive Football Tournament and Live Music performances by our incredibly talented student musicians, to classic games like Dodgeball, Darts, and Golf. Students also enjoyed trying their luck at Shut the Box, Prize Pong, Donut Drop, and the always-popular Crockery Smash. For those seeking a bit more action, there were challenges like Bean Bag Toss, Sponge the Teacher, and the Stuck in the Middle Target Challenge.


All the stands were run by House Captains and Prefects, who worked tirelessly to ensure the success of the day. Their hard work paid off, as the festival raised an impressive £2,600+ for various House Charities, reinforcing the event’s community spirit. There was also a variety of Business and Enterprise stalls, where students showcased their entrepreneurial skills by offering a mix of handmade goods, refreshing drinks, and tasty snacks.


The sunny weather helped create a festive atmosphere, and the smiles on everyone's faces, along with the wide selection of refreshments and treats, made the day even more enjoyable. The festival not only provided lots of fun but also highlighted the school’s commitment to supporting charitable causes and fostering teamwork. With so much positive energy and support for House Charities, the DHSB Summer Festival 2025 was undoubtedly a huge success. A huge thank you to all parents, staff members, and of course our wonderful students for supporting this. Roll on next year!


Ms Cunningham, Head of Houses and Community




Next Gen Chef Competition


This year's City college competition allowed a fantastic opportunity for students to showcase their baking skills, represent DHSB school, and enjoy a day of creativity and friendly competition. The brief was to create a show-stopping cake using the theme: ‘Plymouth’. A team of three year 10 pupils were invited. 


Due to a great interest across the two GCSE Food Preparation and Nutrition classes we held a preliminary round at DHSB. The competition was tight but in the end the flavour and attention to small details such as where the ingredients were sourced, one group stood out, Max, Ollie and Luca. Focusing on locally sourced ingredients to promote what the City of Plymouth has to offer


The students arrived at City College ready for the challenge. They worked as a team to create a classic Victoria Sponge cake. It was filled with strawberries, a mixed fruit jam which they made on the day, and buttercream. The strawberries were picked at Pips Strawberry farm and their friend who has chickens, kindly provided the eggs.  The students said 'we are doing this to support our local community and reduce the food miles on the food we are using, this reduces the impact on the environment'. The cake was decorated in the theme of the National Marine Aquarium as according to their application form, they 'thought that the National Marine Aquarium was a perfect design for our cake as it’s an iconic piece of Plymouth that also helps to represent the city's coastal environment. As well as being an iconic piece of Plymouth the NMA is the UK’s biggest aquarium with the deepest tanks and over 4,000 sea animals'. The cake was wrapped in a simple store-bought blue fondant with 2D fish on the sides, the white NMA logo on top with a 3D Octopus. They said 'we are going to be using bright and coloured fondant to represent Plymouth's bright atmosphere.'


Max, Ollie and Luca were not winners this time but were given some great feedback from City College and Jacka Bakery who were the guest judges. 'Good team work and communication, great design of cake which showed locally sourced and picked produce, fantastic effort gents'.


Thank you to City College for organising a great competition and day for the students. And, a huge thank you to Jacka Bakery for providing goodie bags for the students.




Physics Society Visitor


One of our Physics Ambassadors, Leo Grieve, invited his elder brother Ben to come back to DHSB to speak to our Physics Society. Ben has completed his first year Physics at Bath University so was able to offer some insight into what life is like there. An appreciative audience of students in years 10 to 12 were also treated to an overview of Fraunhofer Diffraction (which explains a feature of one of our favourite A-level practicals that teachers usually try to avoid anyone noticing).



Student Achievement


Computer Science


Mr Scott shared this piece of excellent work. As part of his recent programming project, Marcus Primmer (Y10) has been experimenting with the marching squares algorithm using Pygame, a popular Python library for building games and visualisations. His work demonstrates not only strong coding ability but also a deep curiosity about how computer graphics can be generated through mathematical logic.


The marching squares algorithm is used to create contour lines based on a grid of values. In Marcus’ project, each point in the grid is randomly assigned either a 0 or a 1, creating a field of binary data. The algorithm then checks each square in the grid — each formed by four adjacent points — and analyses the combination of 0s and 1s at its corners.


Since each of the four points can be either a 0 or a 1, there are 16 possible configurations (from 0000 to 1111 in binary). Depending on which configuration a square falls into, the algorithm draws lines connecting the midpoints of the square’s edges. These lines begin to form smooth contours across the grid, offering a clever visual representation of the underlying data.


Marcus’ implementation of this classic algorithm not only shows his ability to apply complex logic in Python, but also highlights the creative potential of code — where maths, programming, and art come together.


Brilliant work, Marcus!



Sparx Maths and Sparx Reader


Each week we celebrate our highest performers in both Sparx Maths and Sparx Reader, two of our core homework platforms. We are proud of all of our students who complete their homework each week to such a high standard but these students deserve a special mention.


Congratulations!




Congratulations Ollie


Last week Ollie Lacey (10W) won Gold at the DMT & Trampoline English Championships 15-16 men category to become the English champion. He also finished 2nd in the trampoline event to receive Silver.


Ollie has been trampolining since he was 5 years old and has competed regionally and nationally over the years. Two years ago he decided to have a break from the sport but after a couple of months, he missed it and went back to the sport with real passion and commitment.


Since returning to the sport two years ago, Ollie has worked really hard on preparing bigger skills and new routines on both the trampoline and double mini trampoline and has been on the podium collecting medals since.


In addition to his latest triumphs, earlier this year, Ollie was also selected to become part of the England squad for the double mini trampoline and is currently in Portugal competing at the Scalabis Cup International Trampoline, DMT and Tumbling Competition.


Ollie has another international competition this October and is also waiting to hear if he has been selected for the World Championships in November.


Good luck Ollie!




PTFA News


What a busy and fantastic week for the PTFA! Firstly Sunday was Summer Disco day and much excitement! Over 500 students enjoyed not one, but two rooms with two different DJs at Fever nightclub - something for everyone and even some Abba for us oldies! I even heard of one student who said she couldn’t leave because she was having so much fun!  Sadly all good things come to an end! 


A big thank you to Sarah for her fantastic organisation, to Isa for being a great volunteer coordinator and to all the volunteers - we really can’t run events without you.


If you think you’d like to volunteer at an event, please submit this form, it can just be an hour or two.  As we finish another year we inevitably lose parents as their children leave DHSB.


On Tuesday, DHSB had a fantastic Open Evening where the PTFA served the refreshments.  A record 950 came along! A big thank you to Jenny and my mum for your help! Thanks to Joanna too for help with the setting up. Apologies to anyone who missed out on a biscuit as we struggled to keep up with demand.


Our next meeting is the 17th September at 6.30pm in the Conference Room (directly behind the Visitor Reception).  Please join us if you can, we’d love to meet you. Refreshments supplied.






Sports News and Results


Howzatt!


On Wednesday 2 July, our U13 cricket side beat Uffculme School by 9 wickets in the Devon State Schools Cup Final. Star players were Evan Burke Henry Howson and Jamie Burt.


This is the first time we have won a Devon Cup in cricket for approximately 18 years. An image of the newspaper article sharing news of the occasion 18 years ago is below.




Plymouth Schools Chess Tournament


Seven of our players represented the school in this competition last weekend; well done to all of them and particularly to Ishi Pondugula and Avi Bartaula who did enough to finish among the 3rd prize winners with 4/6.



Sports Day 2025


This year due to works being carried out at Brickfields, a new format was followed for Sports Day. Instead of all students attending Brickfields for the day and taking part in or watching the usual track and field events, they attended for part of the day and spent the remainder taking part in on site activities. This made the event feel more inclusive and gave all students an opportunity to take part and win house points. On site activities included Basketball, Ultimate Frisbee, Dodgeball, Tug of War, Table Tennis, Archery, Handball, Rounders and Esports.


The sun shone and all went to plan and two school records were broken! Tristan Bigham (Y7) beat the old 400m record of 65.3 seconds with a new record of 64.55 seconds and he also beat the old 800m record of 2 minutes 27.0 seconds with a new record of 2 minutes 26.55 seconds. Well done, Tristan!


The students and staff had an enjoyable day and feedback suggests that the new format was a hit.


The results were shared, the students' achievements were celebrated and medals presented in the Sports Day Celebration Assembly held on Thursday.



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