A STAR GCSE student has scooped a prestigious award and a £200 book token from Westhoughton Rotary Club.

Kira Tansey, aged 16, won this year’s Tony Budd Award, after gaining seven A* grades and one A in her GCSEs.

Her parents Simon Tansey and Sharon Taylor joined her and Westhoughton High School head teacher Phil Hart at a special meeting of the Rotary Club to receive her trophy.

Rotary president John Oakes said: “We greatly value this opportunity to help to encourage and foster academic achievement among the school’s students.

“Congratulations Kira on your success and best of luck for your time at Winstanley College, where you are studying biology, chemistry, maths and graphics and aiming to go on to university in the future.”

The award was inaugurated in 2008 and commemorates Tony Budd, a distinguished former rotary member.

After six years of giving awards to leading A-level students, the club switched this year to honouring GCSE students, owing to the closure of Westhoughton High School’s Sixth Form.

After the ceremony, history teacher Simon Gill was joined by five former students – Natasha Leech, Dan Hodson, Joshua Peet, Ellie Carney and Chloe Pearson – to speak about the school’s trip to Auschwitz in Poland this year.

They were particularly moved by clothes that had been left on pegs outside the gas chambers.

Their owners had never returned to reclaim them, while scratch marks in the bare concrete walls inside gave a graphic illustration of their fate.