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For the first time, QE has this year entered two teams into a national engineering challenge.

In previous years, individual QE teams have performed very strongly in the Engineering Education Scheme, so, for 2016–2017, the School decided to double up.

For the scheme, which is run by the Engineering Development Trust, entrants are asked to develop a solution to a real-life problem relevant to a local company. The scheme includes use of a university’s engineering workshops to develop, build and test their solutions. It requires problem-solving skills and helps the participants learn to work as a team.

Competitors benefit from professional-level lectures on project-management and on communications (written, verbal and visual). Later in the scheme, the boys will be required to prepare a written technical report and then to present their solution to a panel of senior professional engineers.

As the initial six-month project phase got under way, the two QE Year 12 teams paid visits to their respective companies.

Team 1, comprising Mohit Miyanger, Piragash Selvakumar, Richard Cavanagh and Ricky Eatough, are working with Overbury, an office outfitting company which is a major player in its market. Their project aims to deal with issues of working at height, currently the most common source of injury at work in the office outfitting industry.

They visited several Overbury sites in Canary Wharf. Head of Technology Michael Noonan said: “Our first point of call was the Clifford Chance building, owned and leased out by one of the largest law firms in the world. Here we visited the new developing offices of Deutsche Bank, and met with our company representative, Alex Wood, as well as the site managers. The boys were given a formal introduction to the company, after which we were taken around the site. They interviewed many of the workers and supervisors, and began to see some of the issues which working at height present.”

Team 2, which consists of Souhardh Kotakadi , Rahul Kanwar, Visagan Manivannan and Aravindh Manivannan, are focusing on issues of waste management on building sites. Their teacher, Shane Ryan, said: “Our trip took us to construction firm Lovell's Lymington Fields site near Chadwell Heath, a large-scale housing estate under construction since 2011. Here we met with our Lovell’s representative, Sophia Bruce.” Like Team 1, Team 2 received a formal introduction to their company and were given a tour of the site; they, too, took the opportunity to interview workers and supervisors.

“From there, we travelled to Lovell’s flagship project in Woolwich Arsenal, a much busier building site, where the boys were shown a number of different waste management issues and the current ways the company is dealing with them,” said Mr Ryan. “We discussed our next steps with Sophia for designing and manufacturing the prototype, which we aim to complete at our visit to UCL in January.”

Year 9 boys all produced videos on a subject close to their heart – with the winning six being shown in assembly. The finalists tackled a very diverse range of topics, including animal cruelty, road safety and the attractions of Norway.

After congratulating the six, Head of Year 9 Ian Benjafield invited them on stage so they could introduce their videos before the films were viewed by their classmates.

Headmaster Neil Enright was impressed by the creativity of the shortlisted boys and by the level of research that had gone into their videos. He also commended the boys for their public-speaking skills in introducing the films.

Two films particularly stood out, said Mr Enright. These were:

• Anish Khetani’s exploration of the problem of food wastage, which included tips on avoiding waste, easy-to-grasp statistics, some impressive graphics featuring cartoon characters, and even some audience interaction.
• Karan Patel’s powerful video on the dangers of smoking, which used the story of a family, produced from cut-out figures. With high production values, this emotive film provoked the biggest audience reaction.

Both were “very original and very powerful”, said Mr Enright, before announcing Karan, from Underne House, as the winner, with Anish Khetani, of Harrisons, as runner-up.

The other finalists were:

• Hugh Wescott (Stapylton House), who looked at people’s awareness – or lack of it – of their surroundings and the resulting safety implications. This was inspired by the Pokémon Go craze, which saw players walk around with their eyes glued to their phones. Referring to the thousands of injuries suffered each year, Hugh gave a strong, practical message, with road-crossing safety advice. All his footage was self-shot and was edited together well. [Third place]
• Dominic Kumaresan (Pearce), who celebrated his enthusiasm for Norway, with lots of good information and such strong use of images that it seemed almost like a promotional film from the tourist board. [Fourth place]
• Amey Madkaikar (Broughton), who dealt with animal cruelty and the importance of treating animals well. He told how he helps wildlife at home by putting out bowls of rice for the birds. For contrast, this narration was interspersed with images of dishevelled and distressed animals. Amey’s film was produced using WeVideo, an online video editing platform. [Fifth place]
• Ayushman Mukherjee (Leicester), who gave an appreciation of the internet and all it can do, with a particular focus on how easy it is to find information. It featured a humorous ‘shutting down’ final sequence. [Sixth place]

QE boys went to a special interactive lecture show looking at the Mathematics behind The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the best-selling book and award-winning stage show.

Forty-three Year 11 pupils travelled to the event at the West End Gielgud Theatre, which is also currently hosting the stage play.
It was, said pupil Kishan Patel, “really fun and had lots of humour” – a sentiment echoed by his classmate, Nico Puthu, who found the show “very funny with a lot of interesting problems and concepts that you don’t see every day”, while Nishant Saxena said: “The show got us to think outside the box.”

Hosted by comedian and Mathematics communicator Matt Parker, the lecture show, entitled The Curious Coincidence of Maths in the Day-Time, was split into two main parts. The first half explored some of the intriguing and often beautiful mathematical ideas that are touched on in the book, while the second part examined aspects of Mathematics involved in the staging of the smash-hit West End production.

Rob Eastaway, writer of many popular Mathematics books, started by considering the book’s title. He asked what was curious about the dog’s behaviour. The fact that the dog did not bark turns out to be useful information. He went on to look at two other situations in which a lack of data is significant. Kiran Aberdeen took to the stage to see if he could guess the colour of the hat he was wearing – his fellow pupil, Sehj Khanna, found this the most enjoyable part of the show. Rob Eastaway then showed how the distribution of bullet holes on returning aircraft in the war was used to decide where reinforcement was needed.

In the book, the main protagonist, Christopher, must find his way to Fenchurch Street Station when he only knows the approximate direction he should travel in. His strategy led Hannah Fry, lecturer in the Mathematics of Cities at UCL, to look at algorithms for finding the way through a maze, with applications to satellite navigation. She considered how ants navigate their way to food and back to their nest.

A question about the population of frogs in a pond prompted freelance Mathematics speaker Ben Sparks to describe how an iteration formula that is easy to state for populations may turn out to have very complicated, chaotic outcomes. Rob and Hannah looked at two situations in probability that are counterintuitive. In Hannah’s example, she considered how unlikely events are likely to be seen given sufficient observations, whilst Rob looked at a variation of the famous Monty Hall Problem (a probability puzzle).

The second half of the lecture show started with a performance of a scene from the play in which the main character described how he had answered an A-level question involving Pythagoras’ Theorem. Matt Parker then showed a 1:25 scale model of the stage (including furniture) made by the set designer. Since the set is a laid out as a coordinate grid it was possible to position model furniture in the model and then show the real thing on the stage, he explained. In a recorded interview with the set designer, the audience learned that the accurate model is used to check all aspects of the staging and construction. Set design uses a surprising amount of mathematics.

Ben Sparks, who is a musician as well as a mathematician, spoke with the composer, Adrian Sutton, who wrote the score for the play. In the book, the chapters are numbered with the prime numbers; Adrian therefore used prime numbers to shape the music.

The show closed with Rob, Hannah and Ben each sharing a snippet of interesting Mathematics. They looked at: sine waves and sound; Penrose tiling (a pattern of tiling named after the mathematician and physicist, Roger Penrose) and exponential growth.

Afterwards, pupil Bashmy Basheer reflected on the show: “I found the set of talks both informative and fun; it really showed me the beauty of Maths.”

New Government league tables of examination results confirm Queen Elizabeth’s School’s position in the top rank of all schools across both the state and independent sectors.

QE was the country’s top boys’ school for GCSE results, headed in the rankings only by The Henrietta Barnett School, a girls’ school, and by Focus School, a small, co-educational, independent, Christian school in Coventry. At all three schools, 100% of pupils achieved the Government benchmark of five A*-C grades including English and Mathematics.

For A-level results, QE was the country’s second-ranked state school, behind Heathfield Community School in Taunton, Somerset, and just ahead of Henrietta Barnett. The A-level results were ranked by average point score per examination entry.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “It is good to have confirmation in these league tables of the excellence of last summer’s results, when a remarkable 98.8% of A-levels taken here were awarded grades A*-B.”

At Key Stage 4, QE also performed strongly in the Government’s new performance measure, Progress 8, which shows the progress made by pupils in eight key subjects since primary school. Its score of 0.70 was the highest of all five top-ranked schools for GCSE results.

“I am pleased to see our School faring so well in Progress 8: as a selective school, we naturally have a very bright intake of boys, but this new performance measure confirms that our staff are effectively challenging and stretching them to make the most of their potential,” added Mr Enright.

“It is also interesting to note that all of the top three state schools for GCSE results – QE, Henrietta Barnett and St Michael’s Catholic Grammar School – are in the borough of Barnet.”

Leading politicians of every hue took to the stage at a conference for A-level Politics students – and showed each other nothing but respect.

QE’s Year 12 A-level Politics student who had travelled to the event in Westminster Central Hall heard discussion of a wide variety of issues.

Year 12 pupil Rehaan Bapoo, Chairman of QE’s Politics Society, said: “In a world of increasingly hostile politics, it was refreshing to see that in the UK politicians can still be civil with each other, despite their differing beliefs.”

The day featured 15-minute speeches from various senior political figures, such as House of Commons Speaker John Bercow, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sir Alan Duncan, Leading Labour backbencher Chuka Umunna, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg and Douglas Carswell, the sole UKIP MP.

One constant theme was the speakers urging that young people should engage with politics and vote regularly once they come of age. Chuka Umunna explained that he had attended the same conference 20 years before and it had stimulated his interest in Politics by giving him an opportunity to get his questions answered. He said he hoped this year’s event would do the same for the sixth-formers there.

Rehaan reported that the boys were engrossed with the speeches, which ranged in topic from the future of the Conservative Party and the position of Britain in a post-Brexit world to diversity in Politics.

The opportunity given for members of the audience to ask the speakers questions after they had concluded their speeches resulted in “many riveting debates stoked by intriguing questions”. And Rehaan contributed with a question of his own to Sir Alan Duncan: “Were [Leader of the French Front National, Marine] Le Pen to be elected and remove France from the EU, would this be the beginning of an increasingly isolationist Europe?”

QE’s Head of Politics, Liam Hargadon, said “Our Politics students have attended this conference every year and are invariably surprised and challenged by the speakers. It’s a unique opportunity to speak directly to national leaders.”