HALTON’S top performing school has been awarded a prestigious £30,000 grant to give students the chance to embark on a career in the music industry.

Ormiston Chadwick Academy in Widnes secured the funding from the Wolfson Foundation through a competitive application process.

The Liverpool Road school, rated outstanding by Ofsted, will use the money to buy the latest equipment for their high-tech recording studio which the academy built last summer.

OCA has been in the top 100 secondary schools in the country for the past two years and already has a thriving music department with a large number of pupils studying GCSE music.

This investment allows them to offer new high-quality musical technical qualifications.

Principal Tuesday Humby said:“It’s wonderful to see our vision for music come to fruition thanks to the passion and incredible expertise of our head of music, our estates manager and the funding from the Wolfson Foundation.

“We are extremely grateful to the foundation for helping us further improve the quality of provision and we are all extremely excited to get the music technical qualifications up and running with our state of the art equipment.

“Our pupils have been asking for this and Wolfson has made their dreams a reality.”

The Wolfson Foundation is an independent charity which awards grants to support and promote excellence in the fields of science, health, education, the arts, and humanities.

Through its secondary education programme, the foundation supports the teaching of A-Levels and GCSEs at high achieving state-funded schools and sixth form colleges, providing funds for the provision of top quality buildings and equipment.

Paul Ramsbottom, chief executive of the Wolfson Foundation, said: “The Wolfson Foundation was very impressed by this proposal to support a project that was shaped by the pupils themselves.

“We look forward to hearing the results of our support for this high-tech recording studio. We hope that the equipment will inspire the next generation of musicians.”