Ben Stanworth was the winner of the Principal’s Award 2024. Ben also received the CIFE Lord Lexden Prize for the most outstanding value-added results. The ceremony took place at the House of Lords and was followed by a cream tea.

Ben is an MPW graduate who has proved that success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Disappointed with his A level grades of BBD, Ben opted to retake Economics, and take up Politics and History instead of Maths and Physics. He achieved A*A*A*, and with these impressive results, Ben progressed to the University of Bristol to study Law.

He joined MPW with the intention of getting better results for A level: “We went to a couple of places, but MPW really stood out to me as extremely professional, and I will always thank [MPW London Principal] Sally for giving me a second chance, it really changed everything for me. Looking back it was the best decision I have made in a long time.”

We asked Ben to describe how the studying atmosphere at MPW has influenced his improvement, and what struck him most was the professionalism of the school: “Having worked in professional environments, the first thing that struck me was how similar it was to those environments”. This was manifested by both the teachers, “experts in their field, who were extremely responsive and supportive”, and the nature of the one-year courses themselves – “the programs in place are well tested, but flexible, enabling them to be both comprehensive and easily comprehensible”.

The combination proved effective. “I found myself working as hard as I could. There were plenty of places to do this and that helped. The setup made a huge difference. The tech integrations make things really easy and really help when it comes to communicating work and finding resources, and makes a massive difference to the experience. All of these elements allowed me to take full control of my education and pushed me to do better and gave me the resources to quickly learn and improve my results. From a personal standpoint it really helped me regain my confidence in my educational abilities and sort of ‘made me’ if that makes any sense,” Ben told us.

University is a completely new step for all students; they can only look forward to the studying process there. However, our college tries to do the best to help students get used to this environment as quickly as possible.

Ben has found university different to education in college, due to more freedom at the former, although he thinks it has come as less of a surprise than it might have done. “MPW is a very good middle ground in this sense as it gives you a lot of independence, but still gives you enough guidance to really succeed. It’s a very good stepping stone and I can attribute my experience at MPW to my current success in reading Law at Bristol.”

Finally, Ben shared some advice for succeeding in education for MPW students. He encouraged students to make the most of the resources on offer. “I was able to turn things around and now my life is on a very different pathway. I saw some people not take full advantage of their time at MPW. Those who did are extremely successful and ultimately much happier; and I can personally speak about that,” Ben said.

Ben concludes, “The university and degree you choose has a massive effect on your future prospects, and therefore you have to think beyond next week and think about the next five years. Your life is a lot easier when you have an amazing university and degree next to your name.”