An ex Kings Langley Secondary School teacher that relocated to Dubai brought her new set of students over 4000 miles this week to take part in the Stevenage Rock Challenge.

Teacher Gemma Thornley flew to the UK with pupils from Jumeirah College, a British school in Dubai, to compete in the two day event.

The two shows took place on Monday, February 23 and Thursday, February 16 at Stevenage Leisure Centre.

Originating in Australia, the Rock Challenge was introduced to the UK in 1996 by Hampshire Constabulary with the aim to help young people enjoy school and live pro-active lives.

The concept of the Rock Challenge is that each school taking part chooses their own theme to base their eight minute performance on. They then spend time creating, rehearsing and perfecting an array of performance, production and design elements.

Themes can reflect poignant social issues and messages or can be completely fictional.

After ten years of involvement with the Rock Challenge, Ms Thornley realised how much she missed being involved when she relocated to Dubai.

She said: "Other than school productions there also aren't many opportunities in Dubai for young people to get involved with performing arts and, knowing how much the experience benefited my students at Kings Langley, thought that my new students would adore the opportunity to get involved.

"I had heard that there used to be a Rock Challenge in Dubai but after a bit of investigating realised this no longer existed. That's when I began to think of the possibility of flying a group of students across to the UK to compete.

"It took about 18 months of planning and convincing for this to happen and at first I had no idea how many students would want to be involved. But I was delighted when they embraced the idea."

Not only did the parents and relatives of the Jumeirah students travel from Dubai, France and multiple other destinations to watch the first show on Monday, February 23, but there was also a large support crew of Ms Thornley's ex Kings Langley students.

After the first show, Jumeirah College were awarded first place for their performance. Their story was The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern.

Ms Thornley said: "Being able to be involved in a UK competition, helps our students feel closer to the UK and the arts curriculum enjoyed by their peers. They were especially excited to be able to talk to the other schools about living in the Middle East.

"The Night Circus was a recommended read this year for GCSE and AS/A2 students at the college. All students in our team have now read the novel and they have really enjoyed debating the story in our Rock Challenge book club and selecting the main themes they wanted to focus on.

"We had to work closely with them to ensure that what we portrayed was the right message as even though we are coming to the UK we are representing the United Arab Emirates, which means paying attention to our culture that we live amongst every day."