Press Release

Girls score for UK in international football competition

22 June 2006

A team of six girls from Bury Grammar School Girls (BGSG) has been triumphant in winning the UK section of the Starwatch ‘Fit like your champ’ competition, and are travelling to Munich to celebrate their success at a youth festival organised alongside the World Cup.

Year nine students, Charlotte Leach (13), Jemma Nurney (14), Abbie Sellers (14), Helena Thomas-Wilson (13), Lucy Whitworth (14) and Emma Wright (14), who are in the same French class, combined their language skills to link together football, nutrition and fitness and create a multilingual website about Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho Gaúcho (Ronaldo de Assis Moreira) and film a health and fitness DVD.

Mrs Georghiou, Headmistress of BGSG said ‘I am delighted with the girls’ success and there is a very important message here: learning languages can take you to exciting places. I think we are all agreed that Munich is a particularly exciting destination at the moment! We’re all very proud of our winning Bury World Cup team’.

Five European countries - the UK, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands - took part in the competition, which saw participation from 38,000 schools. The winning entries from each country will receive an award at the festival in the Olympic Stadium on 4 July 2006, have their project featured in an exhibition and enjoy watching German boy band US5 in concert.

Isabella Moore, Director of CILT, the National Centre for Languages, the UK partner in Starwatch, said ‘These girls will have a fantastic time in Germany. I hope the competition has encouraged them, and the many others who took part, in their language learning. We want all young people to experience the relevance and enjoyment of languages’.

The Starwatch competition, which rewards innovative language learning, football, nutrition and fitness projects, is organised and run by Zeitbild, a German educational publishing company and sponsored by the European Commission, and in Germany by the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology and the Health Insurance firm KKH. CILT, the National Centre for Languages was supported in the UK by the Association for Physical Education.

For further information see www.cilt.org.uk/sport/starwatch.htm.