Christmas Fair raises £1200

PUPILS, parents and teachers at St Neots Community College raised more than £1,200 at the Christmas Craft Fair.

Hundreds of people visited more than 40 stalls selling jewellery, knitwear, paintings, wooden ornaments, home-made confectionary, greeting cards, flowers and handbags.

There were eight stalls run by pupils for the college's Young Enterprise scheme and the Sixth Form Council and one to support a visit to Ukraine next summer to work with schools and in the community there.

The event included Father Christmas in his grotto.

Meanwhile, the college is one of 100 secondary schools and colleges across the UK to win a project kit consisting of an energy saving ecoquiet PC and a wind turbine large enough to power it.

The competition, which was run by RM, a supplier of ICT to UK education, invited schools to submit proposals for how they would use the kits.

The WindPC kit comes with a booklet of tips on how schools can use the equipment to inspire and engage students, as well as advice on implementation strategies.

Suggestions for how the kit can be used extend across the curriculum from publishing live weather data and energy generation on the school website, through to looking at means of electricity generation and energy loss, and on to the study of the materials used to produce and maintain wind turbines.

The RM ecoquiet uses up to 66 per cent less energy than standard desktop PCs. A typical secondary school with 220 computers running for most of the day could save a 104,350 kWh and as much as £9,000 on its fuel bill in three years.

If all schools in the UK switched to ecoquiet technology, one of the UK's coal-fired power stations could be shut, the competition organisers claimed.

The Government has said it wants 20 per cent of its electricity needs to come from renewable sources by 2020.