An invitation to Buckingham Palace for Lucy and Clara

Mrs Boulton-Pratt, together with Clara Payne in Year 13 and Lucy Pirzada in Year 11, spent a once-in-a-lifetime day at Buckingham Palace in October, following not one but two major triumphs as both Lucy and Clara won their categories in the finals of the TeenTech awards at The Royal Society in July.

The winners are invited to Buckingham Palace by the patron of TeenTech, HRH the Duke of York, and in October 2017 a very special invitation dropped through the School's letterbox. Prince Andrew chatted at length to Lucy & Clara after the awards ceremony, telling them that their ideas really stood out from the crowd, and giving them many words of encouragement.

Lucy’s design was for a self-sufficient, sustainable, mobile floating city at sea: ‘Due to rising sea levels, increasing population and industrialisation, the land available covers only 29% of the world’s surface, much of which is uninhabitable,’ she explained. ‘This will soon be an insufficient area for the growth and development of the human race, therefore we must expand. For my project I researched into the solutions to this issue.’

Clara’s ‘Digestible Energy’ research project was an investigation to determine the optimum preserved forage to be fed to horses for both weight gain and loss. Clara described why she chose her project: 'I wanted to do something in-depth that I could also talk about in university interviews for Veterinary Science' she said.

Mrs Boulton-Pratt was incredibly proud of the girls.