Students at the Plume Academy have designed a museum exhibition that links local migration stories with our national migration history - from the Middle Ages to the present - as part of a prestigious competition.

The Maldon Migration Museum is the Plume Academy heat for Moving Stories, a national competition delivered by the OCR exam board and the Migration Museum in London for History GCSE students across the country.

A total of 27 groups from the school, involving 137 students, submitted entries to the Maldon Migration Museum - out of these entries, two winning groups have now been selected to submit their work to the Moving Stories national competition.

After an agonising decision, prestigious guest judges Robert Winder and Martin Spafford decided on The Windrush Generation by Azeezah Begum, Elizabeth Mills and Harriet Philips and A POW Love Story by Pippa Cane and Mason Foakes.

The winners will be announced during the school's year 11 assembly tomorrow morning (Thursday 21 October).

Matt Springett, the school's subject lead for History, said: "At a time when we are all feeling the effects of a lack of migrants, our history students have been reflecting on the historical migration at the heart of our community's story.

"This exhibition includes tales of medieval Flemish Maldon merchants and tailors, local forced Black and Indian migrants from Empire, seventeenth-century Huguenot refugees fleeing in small boats across the channel, eighteenth-century migrant soldiers and nineteenth-century Irish and German navvies that worked on the Blackwater Navigation and Branch Line to Maldon."

He added: "They also include twentieth-century Polish and Czech airmen that defended our island, prisoners of war (POWs) who married and stayed, the Windrush generation from New Zealand and, more recently, asylum seekers and Eastern Europeans.

"What our students have discovered is that at the heart of each of these stories from across the centuries are normal people - just like you and me - that are looking to better their lives, work hard and settle, yet inadvertently come to shape our local and British identity."

Guest judge Robert is the author of Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain and the former literary editor of The Independent.

Martin is a fellow of the Schools History Project and co-author of the student Migration textbook.

The winning entries will now be taken forward to be judged in the national Moving Stories competition.