St Swithun’s linguist ranked seventh worldwide

Twelve-year-old Chloe Johnson, a student at St Swithun’s school in Winchester, has finished seventh in the world at the annual Education Perfect Northern Championships. Her remarkable score of 15,501 points also earned her a prestigious elite award. Overall, St Swithun’s came a very impressive second out of all schools in England who entered the competition, and fifteenth in the world.

The Education Perfect Northern Championships is a language learning competition where participants are awarded a point for every correct answer. The questions are from a large vocabulary list and from reading, writing, speaking or reading tasks. At St Swithun’s, the students compete against each other in class, learning their chosen languages whilst earning competition points.

Speaking of her seventh place finish, Chloe said; “I really enjoyed taking part in this year’s competition and am very pleased to have done so well. The languages I chose to study were German, French, Latin and Turkish and I also learnt some English grammar.”

St Swithun’s won a total of 28 awards in this year’s competition with its students cumulatively logging 482 hours answering language questions.

Anne Steer, head of German at St Swithun’s, said; “Education Perfect (EP) sends each teacher a detailed report, analysing how each student has performed in the learning of each list, and it gives us valuable feedback on what words students are finding difficult or not. EP has been a huge motivator in the way our students now learn their modern foreign language vocabulary and we are very proud of their achievements in this competition.”