• School of the Year. Those of you who were with us last year will remember that we awarded a prize for the 2011 School of the Year, consisting of £125 worth of linguistics books from CUP (to whom we are of course grateful).  Rather late in the day, we've done the same for 2012. The winner for 2012 is the Mary Erskine School in Edinburgh, which entered no fewer than 189 pupils - over 25% of the school!! Two other schools entered over 100 pupils, so it can be done. Most of the pupils were entered at Foundation or Intermediate level, so if you're considering large numbers, please remember that we're very aware that the 2012 Foundation paper was harder than we intended, so we're going to try very hard to make it easier this year so as not to deter young enthusiasts.  Anyway, well done Mary Erskine and the lead teacher there, Michael Chittleburgh. You'll find the citation at http://www.uklo.org/?page_id=1540.
• Registering and notifying. In case you're unclear about our procedures, here's a brief reminder. We distinguish one-off registration, where you register yourself and your school (which automatically puts you on this mailing list) from annual notification of numbers. 
• Registering. You don't need to register more than once (and I've now weeded out the few people who did register more than once), but if your details change, please email me directly and I'll change them on the database; at present you can't change them yourself.
• Notification. In due course, we shall ask you to notify us of your anticipated numbers for Advanced level so that we can make arrangements for marking; but that will be something for December and January. For Foundation and Intermediate entries we don't need to know your numbers in advance, but we will ask you to share your results with us for statistical analysis.
  
• Practical arrangements. As you know, you can arrange your test at any time during the week February 4-8. For Advanced level candidates, we ask for normal public exam conditions - invigilation, individual working and a strict time limit of 2.5 hours. For the other two levels, however, we leave it to you to decide how best to arrange the test. Many schools let pupils work in teams, and in principle there is no objection to splitting the test into parts to fit with normal teaching slots. However we do ask you not to let pupils take the test paper away, because other schools in the UK (and in fact in other countries) are taking the same test.

Please let me know if you have any concerns or questions.

With best wishes, Richard