A MAIDSTONE primary school has won an award for its innovative website. West Borough Primary School in Tonbridge Road has received the School Website of the Week Award from the Learning Alive website, run by IT company RM.

The school was praised by judges for "an excellent site that uses the Internet to create some great teaching resources."

Diane Hawkins, a year four teacher and IT co-ordinator at the school, plans and maintains the website in her own time. She said: "I'm absolutely delighted. I work on the website at the weekends and in the evenings when my children have gone to bed. It was great fun doing it and it gave me great pleasure."

Following IT courses on how to put a website together, Mrs Hawkins put her learning into practice,and launched the school website last December. Visitors to it can play one of the seasonal cyberhunts, which send the children to fun sites on the internet in search of information about Santa's reindeer or the Easter Bunny.

The website also includes a Who Wants to be an Egyptian Millionaire? game, in which the children have to answer 15 questions about ancient Egypt. Just like the TV gameshow, players can use three lifelines, including phone a friend links, which take the contestant to websites containing the answer.

Education features alongside the fun on the web pages and pupils are encouraged to carry out interactive literacy exercises, improving their literacy skills at the same time as becoming familiar with computer technology.

Mrs Hawkins plans to attend another course to find out how to make the website even more interactive. She added: "We have absolutely superb concerts here. I would love to record them and put samples of them onto our website. I would also like to do panoramic videoing around the school and put that on the web pages, so that you could imagine you were standing in the playground looking around. But I don't know what that will cost - it's whether we can afford the technology."