In 2014 CERN has started to organize “Beamline for Schools” (BL4S), an annual physics competition for high-school students aged 16 or more. In the competition, teams of students from all around the world are invited to propose an experiment to CERN that makes use of a secondary beam of particles with momenta of up to 10 GeV/c from CERN’s Proton Synchrotron.

In the first four years of the competition, 6900 students from all around the world have participated and in total eight winning teams have been selected and invited to CERN for ten to twelve days each.

We will describe the challenges linked to the Beamline for Schools competition, focussing on the communication with all teams in the preparatory phase of the competition, the technical implementation of the winning experiments, the operation of the experiments as well as on the support for the teams analysing the data and preparing publications of the results. We will also report on the impact of the competition on the candidate teams as well as on the winners.

Finally, we will present an outlook for the future of the BL4S competition, taking into account the shutdown of the accelerators at CERN in 2019 and 2020.