TWO teams of students from Haslingden High School competed in the regional heats of the Lionheart Challenge.
At the Macron Stadium in Bolton, the Year 11 groups were set a challenge to create a project to deliver a groundbreaking impact for a local group.
The first team selected an initiative to help single parents and their children share their skills and make friends and the second team developed a project to support the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer community.
Leonah Ellis, 15, and Hayley Vick, 16, won the award for the best presentation for SPEAK Single Parents Exchange Advice and Knowledge.
Hayley said: “It was a bit scary. There were 12 judges and they were all professionals.”
Leonah said: “There were about 300 people in the audience, all about our age, and there was one judge who wasn’t laughing so I made it my job to get him to laugh, and I succeeded. At the end of our presentation he came up and said we had done a good job.”
Hayley added: “We thought about the issues that single parents may face and developed an idea where single mums and dads would be able to meet, share their expertise and their children could also get to meet up and make friends.”
Aqueel Khan, 15, was in the second team and he won the best research award.
He said: “We started out drawing a mind map and discussing different ideas and then settled on the LGBTQ community.
“Our project was called Equal People, I came up with the name, and our aim was to promote integration and equality.
“I was the researcher and I looked up a lot of statistics. We also interviewed a policeman and found that they had specialist officers trained to deal with LGBTQ issues and we found out that the community faced a lot of cyber bullying.”
Careers and Enterprise Co-ordinator Kate Seig-Hogg said: “We had an educational keynote speaker Tim Milner attend school to hold a workshop and after the event he Tweeted, ‘Really delighted to have had a small hand in their success.’
“Both of our teams did really well.”
Unfortunately neither team’s proposal was selected to go forward to the regional final in November. Lionheart is a national enterprise programme.