The 5th Mini Lit Quiz, written and produced in-house, was even bigger than last year’s – there were more schools, more teams and more prizes! Thirty teams from Tyne and Wear, Teesside and Northumberland took part and, with an additional four schools pledged to join us in 2016, the contest seems set to grow.

Our Quiz is modelled on the Kids Lit Quiz (UK) with both individual and team prizes, but has five rounds instead of ten and its own unique style. Each round of ten questions follows a particular literary theme but, unlike the KLQ, there is also a Pictionary round featuring picture clues and between round elimination competitions for cash prizes.

Richard Coates A made an excellent start with a faultless first round but everyone found round 2 tricky, with Chantry A coming out on top. Any team that didn’t play their joker on the Pictionary round probably regretted it as, unusually, it produced lots of top scores. A total of six teams beat the librarians in the next round featuring colours, the only round in which the librarians didn’t lead! The last round, fantasy worlds, was won convincingly by Marden Bridge A, who went on to win the contest.

Teams that win the top three paces aren’t eligible for a round prize, so the final results are as follows:

• 1st place Marden Bridge A Round 1 Chantry C
• 2nd place Richard Coates A Round 2 Chantry A
• 3rd place Gosforth Central A Round 3 Yarm B
• Round 4 Dr Thomlinson C
• Round 5 Richard Coates B

Despite a late start owing to the Freedom Parade that brought traffic in Morpeth to a complete standstill, our tireless and ebullient Quizmaster, Liam Murtagh and professional adjudicator, Diane Darwin kept us to the mark and we finished bang on schedule. (Secretly, we suspect that Gosforth Central and Gosforth East were quite happy to be held up by the Band of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, complete with bearskins and kilts, marching past their coach!)

A very big ‘thank you’ must go to our caretaking, catering and lunchtime supervision teams who worked so hard to get Chantry hall ready in time for the afternoon’s competition, to our IT staff for their technical expertise and to our KS3 stewards, who remained on duty for half an hour longer than expected without complaint, welcomed our visitors and ensured that none of them got lost! This really was a team effort.