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A series of special workshops held at the School gave Year 7 boys the opportunity to enjoy and engage with African culture and arts – and learn about some of the harsher realities of life on the world’s second-largest continent.

A team from the Iroko Theatre Company spent two mornings introducing the boys to African story-telling, music and dance, although the core activity was a mass drumming workshop.

“The boys were enthralled,” said Head of Geography and Religion & Society Guy Boyes. “It was a really engaging workshop and the boys learnt a great deal about many aspects of African life.”

A number of members of staff also attended and joined in with the boys in the dancing. “Everyone had a wonderful time, but there was also a serious side,” added Mr Boyes. “The boys learnt that the workshop leader’s name means ‘Please stay with me’ in English; he was given this name because he was the fourth child – the first three having died in infancy. That alone brought home to boys the reality of infant mortality in a very powerful way.”

The Iroko Theatre Company, which takes its name from an African tree, was established in 1996 by Nigerian-born actor Alex Oma-Pius. It aims to promote an understanding and appreciation of African culture and arts and to enhance the self-confidence and knowledge of children and young people.

Kavi Pau has become the first QE boy in a number of years to win a Choral Scholarship at a top university. He has also secured a place to read Music at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.

Kavi, who is in Year 13, will become one of just four or five tenors in the Gonville & Caius Choir, which consists of between 22 and 24 students. The remainder of the choir comprises eight or nine sopranos, four or five altos and four to six basses.

The Choir, directed by Dr Geoffrey Webber, is one of the world’s leading collegiate choirs, with an international reputation based on its touring, broadcasting and recordings. Many former members of the choir have gone on to study singing full-time at one of the conservatoires.

“Kavi has done exceptionally well, and I am delighted for him,” said Headmaster Neil Enright. “He has participated in a range of musical activities during his career at School and has also taken advantage of opportunities outside, too; his talent, commitment and enthusiasm warrant such success.”

While in Year 9, Kavi won a prestigious drama prize at the North London Festival of Music, Drama and Dance. He was also part of the School’s Purdy Barbershop group; he arranged a version of Bridge Over Troubled Water and the song’s performance brought the group victory in the Senior Popular Category at the Spring Grove Festival.

More recently he was awarded a place in the Rodolfus Choir after excelling in an Eton Choral Course. He has studied piano and singing to Grade 8 and also plays the clarinet.

For his audition for Gonville & Caius, he had to prepare a piece to sing of his own choice, complete a sight-reading test and demonstrate an ability to pitch intervals up or down within an octave and to pick out notes within a chord.

“I’m very pleased to have secured this scholarship,” said Kavi. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for me to pursue my singing, with the prospect of further open doors at the end of my university studies.”

Through the scholarship, students receive free singing lessons and free participation in foreign tours, at least once and sometimes up to three times per year. Choral Scholars also enjoy the opportunity to earn fees for concerts as part of the whole choir, or in small groups for weddings and conferences.

The choir frequently joins with other Cambridge choirs for joint services, such as those of Clare and St John’s Colleges, and has recently made two CD recordings with the choir of King’s College London.

Queen Elizabeth’s School tops the new Government league tables for its 2014 GCSE results and is also ranked among the very best performers across the country at A-level.

QE takes first place among all English state and independent schools for its Key Stage 4 results, with 100% of boys gaining the benchmark five A*-C GCSE grades including English and Mathematics and 99% achieving the English Baccalaureate. The respective national average figures across all schools are 53.4% and 22.9%. (The English Baccalaureate measures the percentage of pupils gaining A*-C grades in English, Mathematics, Science a language and a humanities subject).

When those schools with the 100% benchmark figure are instead ranked according to the average point score per pupil, QE is in fifth place and is the highest-placed school in London.

At A-level, QE comes 10th overall (and is the third-placed state school) when judged by the proportion of pupils (76%) gaining at least grades AAB in the list of ‘facilitating subjects’ drawn up by the Russell Group of leading universities. Facilitating subjects are defined as those which are more frequently required for entry to degree courses than others.

When judged by the average point score per A-level entry, QE’s figure of 269.0 places it in joint 13th place for all schools and in second place among state schools.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “The league tables include a number of different Government measures, and individual journalists have selected different measures to interpret the data. However, the overall picture is clear: QE is among the very highest performers nationally at both Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5.

“Our 2014 results reflect great credit both on our boys and on their teachers, with the highest levels of achievement being maintained once again, notwithstanding the volatility introduced into the public examination system by a number of changes at national level.”

The Holocaust Memorial Service, in which QE boy Drew Sellis appeared as part of a choir, is now available to watch on the BBC iPlayer.

The service in Central Hall, Westminster, which marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, was a national event, which was attended by Prince Charles, Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Leader Ed Miliband.

Drew, of Year 8, is part of the Finchley Children’s Music Group, which was invited to perform an extract from composer Carl Davis’s Last Train to Tomorrow. The service was recorded and broadcast on BBC2. It is available to watch on the iPlayer until 25th February.

Omar Salim, Mehmet Ergisi and Jake Breindel, all from Year 12, attended the Borough of Barnet’s Holocaust Memorial Day. Hundreds attended the event, which took place in the Rickett Quadrangle at Middlesex University’s campus in Hendon. This year’s theme was Keep the Memory Alive. As well as marking the Auschwitz anniversary, the ceremony also remembered the genocide at Srebrenica in Bosnia, which took place 20 years ago.

The Mayor of Barnet, Councillor Hugh Rayner, said: “This year’s theme reaffirms the importance of remembering past events if we are to ensure these horrors are never to be repeated.”

BBC iPlayer link

QE has been named runner-up in a London-wide schools competition involving the creation of a Mathematics video.

A Year 11 team comprising Aadil Kara, Akshay Narayan and Janith Peiris took the MegaMaths Award in the competition run jointly by King’s College London and Exeter University.

The Kings-Exeter Mathematics Competition drew more than 30 entries from school teams across the capital. They were required to make a Platonic or Archimedean solid and explain the mathematics behind it in a short film.

The successful QE team made a five-minute video featuring speeded-up footage and voices. Their chosen solid was a shape with 62 faces, 120 vertices and 180 edges – otherwise known as a truncated icosidodecahedron. Their video earned the following official plaudit when it was posted on the competition website: “So much maths, so fast – this mathematical tour de force from Aadil, Akshay and Janith will keep you on your toes.”

They named their team 1.21 Gigawatts – a reference to the electricity needed to power the time machine in the Back to the Future film trilogy.

The videos were appraised according to three criteria:

• How good was the object made?
• Was the mathematics discussed a) interesting and b) presented clearly?
• Was the video well-produced and engaging.

The video can be viewed on the King’s College website:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/mathsschool/Competition/2014-Winners.aspx

Congratulating the trio, Head of Mathematics Jessica Steer said they will attend the competition’s awards ceremony on 10^th March. She also thanked all the other teams who had entered.

The overall winner of the competition was Henrietta Barnett School.