Going National

Benefits

The major benefit would probably be improved country-wide visibility of the BCS to schools, teachers and parents.

Challenges

One of the main plusses of the Oxfordshire competition has been its local roots. Logistically, it's a big effort for teachers and parents to ferry their team to a prizegiving within the county towards the end of the summer term, but it would be much harder to transport the team to a national event. It's an important objective of ours to be able to give every child who comes to the prizegiving some prize, including small prizes for the lower placed teams. We have been fortunate to have sponsors who have stayed with us over three competitions in six years who have enabled us to provide each child with a prize. We don't know whether this would scale nationally.