The Hampton Extended Learning Project (HELP) is a programme of extended learning open to pupils in the Second Year and above. Now in its fourteenth year, HELP provides an opportunity for Hamptonians to extend their learning in an academic area of their choice.
HELP aims to foster a love of learning, where pupils can pursue their passions free of curriculum and examination constraints. A pupil completing a HELP project pairs with a teacher supervisor who guides them through the process, providing useful mentoring throughout the research and project-writing process. This gives pupils an invaluable opportunity to develop research, communication, and organisational skills. The only pre-requisite for completing a HELP project is that the topic must be genuinely outside the curriculum.
There are four levels of HELP: Level 1 – Second Year, Level 2 – Third Year, Level 3 – Fourth/Fifth Year, Level 4 – Sixth Form. Prizes for Level 4 projects have been awarded to the following Upper Sixth pupils:
- Rohan Crowe – Controlling the uncontrollable: the mathematics of risk
- Adam Jeffrey – Is the medicalisation of OCD, MDD and GAD (and the use of drugs to treat them) the optimum method of treatment?
- Piers Marchant – To what extent was Austrian foreign policy in the 19th century a success?
- James Mellor – The process of reinterpreting and performing Waiting for Godot
- Aaran Thakore – The Syrian civil war and its effects on Lebanon and the contemporary world
Prizes have also been awarded to the following Fifth Year pupils for outstanding Level 3 projects:
- Avi Bhatt – An exploration into concepts and applications of artificial intelligence (AI)
- Matthew Greene – The numbers e vs pi – which is the more important?
- Jayden Oni – Can humanity ever determine a universally applicable certainty?
Dr James Flanagan, Assistant Head and HELP Coordinator, congratulated the pupils on their impressive achievement:
These prize-winning projects represent just a small fraction of the scores of impressive projects that Hamptonians submit each year. I thank the dozens of teachers who, each year, devote their time in supervising their HELP mentees. I also congratulate every pupil who sees a HELP project through from start to finish; they never cease to amaze their teachers with the level of detail and passion that shines through in their work. I’m also delighted to announce that, for the first time, a HELP e-publication is now being prepared, which will allow the whole School community to read some of these outstanding pieces of work.
The publication linked below showcases just some of the outstanding HELP projects produced by Senior Hamptonians during the academic year 2023-24:
