Peterchurch, HR2 0SG

"This is an outstanding school. At its last inspection, it was outstanding in all main categories. Since then it has significantly improved not just in respect of the areas for development identified in that inspection but also in terms of major developments to its educational provision for pupils and in the response that these have generated."
Ofsted, June 09

Speech Night 2008

We were delighted to have as our special guest Josie Pearson, former pupil and Beijing Olympic athlete.

Josie Pearson, from a small hamlet in Herefordshire, is very much a girl in a man's world, the first female ever to force her way into the hitherto all-male domain of wheelchair rugby. This has been therapy through which she has pieced her life and her body together again after a head-on road smash in North Wales five years ago in which her boyfriend was killed and she was left a tetraplegic, her neck broken and paralysed from the chest down. She was just 17 years old.

It was while she lay in hospital pondering what to do with the rest of her life that she got chatting to an out-patient who played wheelchair rugby. "That conversation changed everything for me," she says. "Before my accident I was a competitive horserider and I wanted to stay in sport in some way. Wheelchair rugby sounded so good. Horses had been my life, my passion, but the level of my disability doesn't allow me to compete in disabled equestrian events. I have no trunk muscles or feeling in the lower half of my body and no mobility from the top of the chest downwards.

"I was doing my A-levels at the time at Hereford Sixth Form College, so my main priority was to get home and back to normality, to get my independence back. You lose everything, totally relying on other people. So I completed my A-levels and went on to university in Cardiff and decided that was the time to get back into sport. My body could not do what my brain tells me to do, so I made up my mind I would rather live with all the good memories of horseriding. I started playing wheelchair rugby and fell in love with it. I've never regretted my decision to try something different."

And how different. For this is the full-on, blood-and-thunder sport Paralympians call "Murderball". Crash, bang, wallop on wheels. In reality it has little in common with the sport seenat Twickenham – it is played with a round ball and it is more an amalgam of wheelchair basketball and the dodgems.

But for this slim, vivacious blonde it is a dream-team sport. "It gives you an adrenalin rush, there's a lot of stop, start and speed involved. It's the same sort of buzz I used to get when riding horses. I really enjoy it. For me, it ticks all the boxes. I have been doing it now for three years and never looked back. Now it occupies all of my time."

Pearson, who lives with her parents in Brilley near Whitney-on-Wye, travels to play for her club team, the Cardiff Pirates. She also has three gym sessions a week as well as attending the camp in Norfolk where the international squad had two or three sessions a day as they prepared for the eight-team competition at Beijing's University of Science and Technology.

Her historic selection for Team GB came in June, when being named for the 12-strong squad made her not just the only woman in the team, but also in the Paralympic competition. So, is it difficult being a female in what is essentially a male sport? "Physically it is harder for me, as you are classified on your muscle function. At the moment, gender doesn't come into it, though I have to train that much harder to keep up with the guys.

"There's a lot of aggression involved, but it is a controlled aggression. You use your chair to stop the opposition, but it's also very tactical. You have to be switched on upstairs as well as being fit, it's a sort of woman-to-man marking. It's a very male-dominated sport and I hope my presence in Beijing will make more women aware of it."

In the team she does not do much ball-handling. Her job really is to stop the other players getting the ball. The boys call her their Dallaglio. "I get in the way of the opposition so the other guys can do their stuff. Off court there's a bit of banter, but on it I am just another player with a job to do. The great thing is that I am totally accepted."

Wheelchair rugby was a demonstration sport in Atlanta in 1996 and introduced into the Paralympics in Sydney. There are four or five teams out of the eight who will compete in Beijing who could come away with gold, including GB. Chief rivals are the US, New Zealand, Canada and Australia.

It is played four-a-side on a basketball court, with tactical substitutions. Full wheelchair contact is allowed but no body contact. The ball has to be bounced every 10 seconds beforebeing passed and there is a touchdown when it is carried over a line between two cones.

The sport is designed for those who have broken necks and are tetraplegic. It has a rather complicated handicap points system, similar to polo, depending on the degree of disability. There are about 90 players in the country and Pearson is one of only four women. Team manager Mark Fosbrook, who has been playing wheelchair rugby since 1993, is a double below-the-knee amputee, born without feet or ankles and with only two fingers on each hand. He says of Pearson: "She has worked well and trained hard and proved she is worth her place. In a comparatively short time she has become a very capable player who has committed herself totally to the sport. We are really proud of her.

"In Athens we finished fourth and we still have eight members of that team in Beijing. So we have high hopes – the top teams are so close you could flip a coin."

Pearson has also been showing some Tanni Grey-Thompson- like speed as a track athlete, working in Wales with the former Paralympic ace Chris Hallam, and has recorded the world's sixth-fastest times in the 100m and 200m. "Maybe this is something I can explore more in the future, but right now rugby is my priority. Beijing wasn't really a goal for me, my focus was 2012, so all this is a bit of a bonus."

Message from an icon: Chris Hallam, one of the UK's leading disability sports coaches -

Josie is a remarkable young woman. She came to me when I was running a wheelchair racing group in Cardiff. She has fought hard to make her mark in rugby and I'm so pleased for her. Josie is a terrific girl, as a person and an athlete, and I have tremendous admiration for the guts and determination she has shown after her accident to get where she is after a comparatively short time. She is the only athlete I've encountered recently who I had to stop training. She tends to do too much. She'd even have a weight-training session before coming to me and I'd have to bawl her out. Most athletes you have to drag along to three or four sessions a week but Josie wants to be there every day, even though I'd tell her before the session, 'I'm going to hurt you'. She's only been doing wheelchair sport for three years after two years in rehab so what she has achieved at 22 is remarkable. I'd love to see her and the team get a medal in Beijing but what a prospect for 2012.

Speech Night was a very special occasion for the school and we were reaaly happy to see last year's leavers, prize-winners and their families on November 6th.