Category: Key Stage 3

CyberFirst Girls 2025!

I am delighted to share the winners of the CyberFirst Girls Competition in Wales have been announced, and I am incredibly proud to confirm that our learners placed 4th overall in Wales, securing a position within the top ten schools nationally. This is a fantastic achievement and a real testament to the dedication, resilience, and teamwork shown by all learners involved.

28 Year 8 learners, working in teams of four, competed against schools across Wales in a series of demanding computational thinking challenges. These tasks spanned a wide range of cyber security concepts, including cryptography, logic, artificial intelligence, and networking, all for the chance to be crowned cyber security champions.

As a collective, the learners completed challenges worth between 5 and 200 points, depending on difficulty, achieving an impressive overall score of over 10,000, over 3000 more than last year, that placed them 4th in Wales, showing a massive step up in the competition this year. This score and result reflects the outstanding effort, problem-solving skills, and commitment shown by every participant, not just those at the top of the leaderboard.

As recognition of this success, the four learners who achieved the highest scores will be invited to attend a further celebration day at Celtic Manor, where they will meet cyber professionals and attend an evening Gala Awards event, including a three-course meal and formal celebration evening. 

In addition, our learners have been invited to attend a celebratory event hosted by CyberFirst Wales at ICC Wales, Newport, on 23rd March 2026, which will include:

  • A live final challenge
  • Attendance at the Women in Cyber Conference, where learners will hear inspiring talks and meet female role models working within the cyber industry
  • A celebration buffet and party
  • A certificate-awarding ceremony

Further details will follow at the start of 2026. For now, we wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate the amazing work of all learners by having a celebration and award celebration, which was a great success.  Thank you to Mr Jones and Mr Rae for attending and presenting the awards. 

CyberFirst Girls receive their certificates from Mr Jones, Headteacher.

The SHRN Student Health and Well-being Survey 2025

The School Health Research Network is led by Cardiff University in partnership with the Welsh Government and Public Health Wales. Every two years, learners attending secondary schools in the Network are invited to take part in The SHRN Student Health and Well-being Survey. The information collected in the survey is used to compile a bespoke report for each school, which supports their work to improve their learners’ health and well-being. Importantly, no individual learner can ever be identified within this report as only aggregate data is shared.

Pencoed Comprehensive is taking part in The SHRN Student Health and Well-being Survey this term. The survey is being managed by Ipsos on behalf of Cardiff University and is completed on-line under the supervision of a member of school staff. It contains questions on health behaviours, including diet, physical activity, smoking, alcohol, drugs, school life and relationships. Learners in Year 9 and above only will be asked a small number of questions relating to sexual behaviour. Each learner chooses whether or not they want to complete the survey and they can omit any question they do not want to answer.

At the end of the survey, learners are invited to give their name, date of birth and postcode for the purpose of data linkage research. This enables researchers to connect survey responses across different rounds of the two-yearly survey, in order to investigate how and why health and well-being change through adolescence. It also allows answers to be anonymously linked to other data that is routinely collected about them by trusted organizations like the NHS and Welsh Government such as GP appointments and GCSE results. Read more
about data linkage in this leaflet.

It is made clear to learners that this is voluntary, and they do not have to provide this information if they do not want to. The school will show learners a video recording about this, which you can view here, along with further information about data linkage. If you cannot access the video or website, please email shrn@cardiff.ac.uk.

All data will be treated in accordance with the Data Protection Act (2018) and the General Data Protection Regulations, and you can read our data privacy notice here: www.shrn.org.uk/gdpr. The survey is strictly confidential unless a learner response raises concerns about their welfare, in which case we will notify the school’s safeguarding officer if we have the learner’s name. Cardiff University use the survey data to compile The SHRN Student Health and Well-being Reports and for research into adolescent health. These Student Health and Well-being Reports contain only aggregated data, e.g. the percentage of Year 7 boys who eat breakfast daily.

If you have any queries, please do notify your school as soon as possible.