8 April 2026 News Abingdon Keep the fires burning As part of the service and citizenship scheme, our Third Year students completed a bushcraft course. They learned how to safely use tools including knives, axes, and saws as well as how to do some practical whittling. They then used their creations to attempt to light fires with a fire steel. They were further incentivised with the promise of being able to toast marshmallows over the fire if successful. Following on from this, students became a little more adventurous and learned how to cook on a bigger fire. On 12 March, Lower Sixth Psychology students attended Psychology in Action at Warwick Arts Centre. They listened to a series of engaging lectures from leading psychologists covering a wide range of topics. Talks included how behavioural science can influence people’s decisions and how attention and concentration develop from childhood to adulthood, as well as providing some practical strategies for improving focus. In This talk may cause side effects the speaker started with the story of a US Police officer who had apparently overdosed on Fentanyl, as it happens he hadn’t, but believed that he had. This belief was enough to cause him to collapse and go into respiratory failure before a colleague administered an antidote. This ‘Nocebo’ effect reflects the darker side of the placebo effect, explaining how our expectations of medications and drugs can sometimes cause us to experience negative symptoms. The final talk introduced us to ‘Mr Fur Potato’ to offer some light-hearted relief to the subject matter: “psychopaths” and what is meant by this term. Entitled Is your teacher a psychopath? we were relieved to find out that teachers are at the top of people least likely to be psychopaths - phew! Psychology in action Scholarly learnings Our Third Year scholars visited Portsmouth Historic dockyard in March, as part of their academic scholarship provision. The visit started at Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, where they really enjoyed getting to grips with Napoleonic gun drills. This was followed by the Mary Rose museum where they had a session exploring the likely causes of the sinking of the ship and spent time looking around the exhibition.
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