The Times newspaper’s inaugural Spelling Bee competition was a major success with fierce competition from schools across the country sparking a real interest in spelling.

The team of Gordon Hao, Dylan Amin, JonahSurkes and Prahalad Prasad from St Martin’s all boys School in Northwood were the eventual champions after a tense final round in London.

The nationwide competition has set off a real passion for the intricacies spelling among parents, teachers and students.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls, writing in The Times about the competition, said: ‘It should be obvious to all that spelling really matters.

There are those who say that the rules of English spelling are too complicated and that we should all change to phonetic spelling - I have to say I have no truck with that idea.’

He continued to say that English was one of the great languages of the world and that one of his priorities as schools secretary was helping children to use it correctly.

‘The Times championship, with its online tests, is a really good example of how new technology can be used to learn old skills in a fun way,’ he said.

The variety and difficulty of some of the words correctly spelt during the competition was astounding with students correctly spelling words such as ‘kleptomaniac’, ‘cyanide’, ‘paraplegic’,‘analgesic’ and ‘ichthyology’.

As tutors and parents, the overwhelming success of the Spelling Bee is a positive development and serves as a launching pad for getting children involved and excited by the possibilities of words with this excitement promoting a love of spelling.

Jonah Surkes, one of the stars of the competition after a blistering performance in the rapid fire final round, wrote on his school’s website that the teams was ‘overjoyed’ to have won and that they ‘felt like kings’ after their achievement.

Describing their victory Jonahcalled it the best day of their lives and said: When we found out that we won we were overjoyed! We were interviewed by Newsround and The Times for the video, and we had lots of fuss made of us!’

As part of their prize the boys will now get the opportunity to edit The Young Times, the paper’s section dedicated to younger readers, during September.

The Spelling Bee training website can be found here and offers children the chance to play and practise with words.

The games offer settings from easy to medium and hard and allow children to challenge each other as well as doing ‘word workouts’ aimed at improving their vocabulary.