Four students from The Highfield School in Letchworth have been crowned East of England champions in the CyberFirst Girls competition.

Students Susannah, Isabella, Harriette and Freya attended the regional finals in Ipswich - competing with other schools in a series of problem solving, logical thinking, coding and encryption challenges.

They qualified for the event following a series of online challenges, in which 600 schools and more than 8,500 girls from across the UK took part.

On Saturday, March 11 they were invited to attend the CyberFirst Girls awards evening at the Titanic Hotel in Belfast. 

During the day the girls visited the Titanic Museum and took part in a number of challenges including an escape room, a virtual reality task and an encryption problem involving locked safes.

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Several members of the National Security Centre gave speeches at the awards, including chief executive Lindy Cameron, and actor Hannah Khalique-Brown, who played a cybersecurity analyst in Channel 4's The Undeclared War.

Mr Holmes, head of computer science, commented: "I’m incredibly proud of the students, they have devoted a huge amount of time both in the initial qualifiers and in the final. It was wonderful for the students to attend the awards evening and be recognised for their work."