THE final of the annual Spoken English competition at Mount House School — a celebration of prose and poetry — produced a wide range of outstanding performances from the children aged from 7 to 13.

The object of the competition is to develop the children's presentation skills, and to encourage them to perform rather than just to read their piece, which can be taken from published works, or written by the children themselves.

There could have been nobody better qualified to comment on the quality of the performances than this year's joint adjudicators, Andy and Caroline Secombe, both accomplished professional actors as well as ex-Mount House parents.

Caroline Secombe who, under her stage name of Caroline Bliss, starred alongside Timothy Dalton in the James Bond films The Living Daylights and Licensed to Kill, introduced the competition.

The winner of the poetry category for forms 1 and 2 was Benedict Thornton-Wood, whose performance of 'The Visitor' by Ian Serraillier was praised for its use of a variety of voices and changes of intonation. The poetry class for forms 3 and 4 was won by Indira Falle, who delivered Alfred Noyes' poem 'When Daddy Fell into the Pond', using excellent character switches.

The adjudicators were unable to choose between Elsa Kent who performed Lewis Carroll's 'The Jabberwocky', and Max Hayward with 'Excuses, Excuses' by Gareth Owen, so they shared first place in the fifth and sixth forms' section. Oenone Rodgers won the fifth and sixth form prose competition with an excellent performance of an excerpt from 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole' by Sue Townsend.