The 2025 Sadlier Stokes prize laureates

On Anzac Day, April 25, the winners of the 37th Sadlier Stokes Prize were officially awarded their prizes by Her Excellency Ms Lynette Wood. Once again, the Sadlier Stokes Prize was a resounding success, with a large number of high-quality projects submitted from schools from across France, both mainland and overseas.

Each year, the Prize, named in honour of Lieutenant Clifford Sadlier and Sergeant Charlie Stokes, rewards three projects created by French schools – an elementary school, a collège (middle school) and a lycée (high school) – on the theme of Australia’s participation in the First World War. Themen had distinguished themselves through their bravery during the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux 108 years ago.

Let’s take a look at this year’s three winning projects.

The ‘Top Secret Notebook’ by the CM1A class from the Saint Paul Notre Dame primary school in Beauvais.

The first of these projects, and the winner in the primary school category, is “’Top Secret Notebook”’ by the CM1A class from the Saint-Paul Notre-Dame school complex in Beauvais, in the Oise region.

This is a puzzle book in which the reader is invited to “decode” various elements of the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, encrypted in many different ways (first letter of each word, sawtooth encryption, replacement of letters by numbers and numbers by letters, Acrostiche, Polybius’ square, pinpricks, cache system, affirmative-negative sentences, Julius Caesar’s code, inverted alphabet).

In this way, the children were able to use cryptology to shape their learning about the events at Villers-Bretonneux in 1918, in which the Australian Imperial Force took part.

The school plans to invest the prize money in equipment such as books, software, models and other teaching aids for the pupils.

The “Western Front – Australians in the French Trenches” project by the 3eD class from the Val de Saône middle school in Montceaux.

The “Western Front – Australians in the French Trenches” project, the winning entry among the secondary schools that took part, is a board game developed by the 3eD class at the Val de Saône middle school in Montceaux. Combining a recreational dimension with historical relevance, the development of this game required a great deal of research by the pupils involved and also represented a challenge in terms of cross-curricular teaching across 4 disciplines.

In English, History-Geography, Technology and Art classes, the pupils not only studied their subject in depth, but also designed the rules, the cards and even the board and the various elements of the game, which they printed in 3D.

Check out the rules of “Western Front – Australians in the French Trenches”, presented by its creators:

The school plans to use the prize money to organise a school trip for the winning class to visit the Underground City of Naours, the Sir John Monash Centre and the Australian National Memorial in the Somme.

The laureates from the Collège du Val de Saône recieving the Sadlier Stokes Prize at the Sir John Monash Centre

The project “A friendship across the oceans: Australia and Guadeloupe on the Western Front during the First World War” by the Seconde 2 from the Baimbridge High School in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe.

The project “A friendship across the oceans: Australia and Guadeloupe on the Western Front during the First World War” by the Seconde 2 at Baimbridge, Guadeloupe, is the winning project in the High School category. It involves the production of a video capsule telling the story of the meeting and friendship of a young Australian soldier and a young Guadeloupean soldier during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, through filmed scenes and archive images selected by the students.

This project highlights and parallels the participation of Australian and Guadeloupean troops in the First World War, both separated from the Western Front by the oceans. The project aims to symbolise the universality of human sacrifice and the hope of a better world, while strengthening the links between memory, history and citizenship.

This is also the first time that an overseas school has won the Sadlier Stokes prize since it was first awarded.

The school plans to donate the prize money to the Baimbridge High School’s social fund, as part of the school’s commitment to solidarity and in line with the values of fraternity and mutual aid highlighted in this project.

The Sadlier Stokes Prize, created in 1989, is supported by the Australian Embassy in France and the Sir John Monash Centre. If you would like to find out more or take part in the 2026 edition of the Sadlier Stokes Prize, please visit click here.