’A year like no other that any of us here have ever experienced, nor would want to experience again.’

That was how Ramsey Grammar school headteacher Annette Baker described 2020 in her last ever prize giving speech before retirement.

She praised students and staff for their resilience during the pandemic, describing them as ’My heroes of this unprecedented year’.

Mrs Baker said: ’On March 23 our school closed for the last time in our former normality, reopening to the children of key workers only the next day as everyone else locked down to halt the spread of a virus that was making its insidious advance into all our lives.’

’Our teachers and learning support staff had to take on a set of extraordinary tasks and challenges for which they had no notice to prepare for, but which they fulfilled with distinction.’

’Overcoming fears about the risk to their own health and their worries about bringing the virus back home to their families, they came in to school to teach, cook, do craft activities, bake, exercise with Jo Wicks and to play with the children of key workers who needed them to be there.’

Speaking of the teachers’ adaptability during the disruption, Mrs Baker said: ’Teachers reconfigured the way they teach overnight, grappling with IT programmes they had never used in this way or ever before to deliver online learning programmes they had no time to prepare.

’They worked with extraordinary but characteristic skill and dedication to produce centre assessed grades to fairly reflect the efforts of a generation of young people so brutally and abruptly robbed of the chance to sit their exams in school.

’They made countless telephone calls to vulnerable students, to families we knew were struggling during lockdown and to students who weren’t engaging in online learning.’

Summarising this year’s exam results, she said: ’At GCSE the school obtained a pass rate for all students at five (GSCEs) at A* to C with English and maths of 66.2%, our second highest result ever.’

She added that 93% of year 13 had secured a place at their first-choice university.