St Albans Girls School student Katie Jones, in year 13, beat over 100 nominees and took the coveted award for being Best Volunteer in Hertfordshire last month at an exciting awards ceremony held at County Hall Hertford.

Katie was presented with the award for her work at the St Albans Council as a Youth Health Champion.

She was the main driving force that inspired a group of like-minded peers to create a workshop and a video about clear sex education for young people. That highly successful workshop also went on to win this year's national Royal Society for Public Health Youth Health Champion Award.

A spokesperson for the Panel of judges said: “Katie is a wonderful role model and her work has touched people around the world. She has worked tirelessly for the causes that matter and is a very worthy recipient of this year's Young Volunteer of the Year Award.”

In addition to this, Katie has also been part of an innovative project called Message in a Bottle. This is run by youth councillors and they invite peers and older adults to post messages of hope back in time to their younger selves.

Katie took the messages and transformed them into works of art which were then uploaded to a Tumblr account. This innovative idea has proved to be a great success and the site currently has over 200 followers.