Last Friday Peter Cambrell and I took three students to Tamworth for the regional Worldskills finals.
They were, Curtis Tuenderman for Information Technology, Jessica Heal for Business Services and Cody Bowman for Hospitality – Cookery. All three performed very creditably with Cody and Curtis finishing just out of the medals in fifth place.
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Jessica won the Gold Medal and will be representing Gwydir in the state finals in March next year possibly in Orange though the venue is still to be finalised. Jessica kept up our very proud tradition of Warialda High winning at least one category at region every year. |
This is our second Business Services winner and Donna Smith their teacher deserves a lot of the credit for preparing her students so well. We know that Jessica is one very tough and determined competitor and with the amount of preparation that she will do will be very hard to beat in the state finals. Should she be successful at state she will represent NSW at the National Worldskills final to be held later in 2008 (possibly in Sydney or Perth).
All three competitors were a credit to themselves, their families and Warialda High. Unfortunately our team was depleted this year due to illness with several competitors unable at the last minute to attend. This was sad for them as we had a couple more definite medal prospects.
I invited Peter Cambrell to go along for his own professional development as he had not previously had anything to do with the Worldskills competition. Peter thought that he would basically be an observer for the day at the Information Technology competition. However this was not the way it turned out as he spent the whole day marking the this competition.
He certainly got to see first hand how a competition works and he already has some ideas on how the competition can be improved in 2008. I thought that this competition might be very interesting to Peter and it seems that I was right.
Wayne Squires,
Gwydir Vocational Coordinator
