Two cohorts run in 2026. This page describes the summer intensive (6–19 July). A four-week autumn cohort spread across after-school sessions runs 1 September – 1 October — see Junior Advanced — Autumn 2026.
Junior Advanced is a two-week hybrid programme for high-school students aged 15 to 18 who already write code or have placed in a security CTF. It is the accelerated cousin of the flagship Cybersecurity Summer School: the same six pillars, paced for a younger and faster cohort, closing with a three-day team hackathon.
Who it is for
The programme assumes:
- comfort with the command line and at least one programming language;
- some prior exposure to security topics — a CTF placement, a HackTheBox rank, an open-source contribution, a school project on the subject, or equivalent;
- the maturity to work in a small team for two weeks under in-person supervision.
It is not an introduction. Applicants without prior coding should look at the Junior Summer School instead.
What you will learn
Everything in the Junior Summer School — plus the advanced material that can’t fit into a two-week beginner cohort:
- offensive primitives (network reconnaissance, web exploitation basics, simple binary analysis) taught defensively;
- detection engineering on real telemetry — Suricata rules, Sigma authoring, and a small SIEM lab;
- a deeper open-source contribution requirement — every participant lands at least one merged PR upstream;
- a three-day team hackathon at the close, with an external jury, instead of the Junior cohort’s classroom-only project review.
The six pillars (cybersecurity, cyber hygiene, cyber awareness, open source, project management, public speaking) stay the same — they are just covered at adult-cohort depth. See Curriculum for the full structure.
How the two weeks are arranged
| Week | Focus |
|---|---|
| Week 1 (6–12 Jul) | Cybersecurity foundations · Cyber hygiene · Cyber awareness |
| Week 2, days 1–4 (13–16 Jul) | Open source · Project management · Public speaking |
| Week 2, days 5–7 (17–19 Jul) | Three-day capstone hackathon |
Pastoral care and supervision
The cohort is supervised throughout by chen.ist staff and a team of tutors drawn from the senior programme. Pupils stay together on the campus and parents receive a daily summary by email.
After the school
Pupils completing the programme receive a certificate, an invitation to the chen.ist Computer Club, and — for the strongest hackathon projects — a standing offer to return to the senior programme as participants when they are old enough.