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PUPILS at a Bradford primary school have visited London to take part in a chess tournament involving schools from around the country.

Horton Park Primary is the first school in Bradford to work with Chess in Schools and Communities, a London-based charity that works to promote chess, mainly in primary schools in the UK.

It has helped numerous children develop a love of chess, and earlier this month a team from the school attended the annual London Chess Classic in Olympia. CSC tutor Nick Mullan, who has been working with the children for over a year, said: “The children have all made excellent progress with their chess since we started the programme around 18 months ago.

“The core group of 6 children have been learning since then so I felt that they were ready to take on the challenge of competing at a national level.”
The children travelled down on the Sunday before the start of the schools competitions, accompanied by deputy head Saima Bahadur and Tufail Rehman, teaching support assistant, who drove the school minibus.

Over the course of the event the children got to see chess grand masters and play against children from other schools.

They sat where the grandmasters sit, using the same chess sets, and their moves were shown on giant screens as they were made. As winner of the school tournament, Hiba Efil was elected to represent Horton Park.

The children played 5 rounds of games in year groups. After the final scores had been calculated, Malcolm Pein, chief executive of Chess in School awarded medals to the best performers.

Mr Mullan said: “We didn’t quite get in the medals but we came pretty close and all our players did very well, winning the majority of games. I’d like to congratulate our pupils for their efforts.”