Orla M, a year 8 student from Heritage High School has become the first student to read all of the books and pass every Accelerated Reader book quiz from her year group’s TTCT recommended reading list.

The recommended reading lists was only launched a matter of months ago which makes this achievement even more impressive. At The Two Counties Trust every student in years 7-11 has a list of 10 books, which have been carefully curated to stretch our students’ reading ability as well as their understanding of the world we all share.

On our launch day back in May, Orla set herself the challenge of being the first student in the school, and hopefully the Trust, to read all the books on the Year 8 TTCT reading list. Orla said, “I am very competitive, and I enjoy reading so I decided to set myself this challenge. The first book I read was ‘Stormbreaker’ by Anthony Horowitz. I enjoyed this book a lot so I will read the rest of the series. The list was very varied, and I enjoyed all of the books, even though some of them were out of my Fiction comfort zone.”

She also highlighted that her favourite book from the reading list was ‘The Bone Sparrow’, “I liked how the story built and I liked the characters” However, she went on to say “the book I would be most likely to recommend to someone in my year group would be ‘A Kind of Spark’ because the narrator has an interesting perspective and the introduction gets your attention from the start.”

We would like to say a huge well done to Orla for reaching her goal and for inspiring her friends and potentially other students across the Trust to take on this challenge.