This term, our biology and chemistry departments stopped teaching side by side and started teaching together. The joint question for every year group: what is happening to the water, soil and air around our town — and what can we do about it?
Middle School pupils sampled the river at six points, testing for nitrates and phosphates in the chemistry lab. Upper School biologists cultured what they found, mapping microbial life the town has never seen charted. The results — some reassuring, some not — were presented to the town council in May.
Real research, real stakes
Nothing about the project was simulated. Samples were real, instruments were calibrated, and the council asked real questions — including difficult ones about farming runoff that our Year 11s answered with admirable steadiness and better data.
What comes next
The physics department joins the partnership in autumn for the energy chapter: solar mapping of every school roof in the valley. If biology and chemistry can ask the question, perhaps all three sciences can help answer it.