Students from a school in Bushey visited the University of Hertfordshire to take part in the regional heat of a national competition created by the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Twelve students from year 12 at Queens’ School took part in the competition, called the BASE (Business Accounting and Skills Education) Challenge.

The challenge was based upon an exam that must be taken by those who train to be chartered accountants, and consisted of several tasks which were based around evaluating the best decisions to suggest towards the CEOs of a company, and culminated in an on-stage presentation explaining their final recommendation along with why they selected it.

Seventeen-year-old Mohammed Ghuas, who took part in the completion, said: "Regardless of being unable to secure a win, the BASE Challenge gave an interesting insight into the work that ICAEW chartered accountants do.

"The challenge itself was very tough: we had to analyse a vast amount of data and then make a four minute presentation on it - they were very strict on the four minute deadline.

"Though not many of the team had spoken in public before, they found the experience very useful. We all accepted after that we were in an environment we weren't used to, it was definitely not the same as doing classwork or presenting to your classmates.

"The hall was massive and many were present. There were two teams of six from each school that entered however we had never heard of these schools before and they weren't who we were expecting."