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A safety device developed by a team of Sixth Form engineers has won a national construction industry award – and was only pipped for the top prize by a multi-million pound project sponsored by British Airways.

QE’s team in the Engineering Education Scheme, partnered by Overbury, took a Highly Commended Award in the Innovation category in the Constructing Excellence Awards. (They were beaten by the airline’s i360 observation tower in Brighton, which holds the Guinness World Record for the most slender tower in the world.)

After the result was announced following judging by the Constructing Excellence South East panel at Lancaster Hotel London, representatives of Overbury, a national fit-out and refurbishment specialist, came into School to present the award to the boys in assembly.

Congratulating the team, Alex Wood, industrial mentor and health and safety advisor at Overbury, added: “Partnering with Queen Elizabeth’s School and helping these four students fulfil their extraordinary potential has been an incredible experience. We look forward to seeing them continue to develop and utilise their enormous talent and we have no doubt that these students will go on to achieve big things in the industry.”

Overbury had asked the pupils to tackle one of the most prevalent health & safety concerns in construction – the safe use of movable podiums when working at height. The main issue with such podiums, which are very commonly used in the industry, is that they provide no automatic wheel–locking system. Operatives can be working at 12ft when standing on a podium, which, if unlocked, can easily move, putting the worker at serious risk.

Team leader Richard Cavanagh and fellow Year 12 pupils Ricky Eatough, Mohit Miyanger and Piragash Selvakumar were tasked with designing and making an attachment for podiums that would remove the need for operatives to consciously lock the wheels before using the equipment. They were given six months to complete the challenge, and in this time, they visited two of Overbury’s biggest construction sites, interviewed health and safety professionals and researched possible solutions.

After careful planning, in-depth analysis and thorough research of the issues, the team created a safety spring device which involved a kick step on the podium, allowing it to stay secure regardless of weight or height. Making the device required advanced engineering techniques and processes, including casting aluminium and the use of CNC routers.

The design will now be used by construction operatives working at height on podium steps, both in indoor and outdoor environments.

Michael Noonan, QE's Head of Technology, who oversaw the boys ’ participation in the scheme, said: “The four really went above and beyond the requirements for this project. The methods applied involved complex applications, which I would not expect 16 and 17-year-old students to devise. All four boys have worked extremely hard throughout the course of the project and I am delighted that their efforts have been recognised.

“It is a truly remarkable achievement, and the many professionals present at the awards event commented on the boys’ outstanding commitment and energy in delivering such a professional project.”

Team leader Richard added: “Taking part in the Engineering Education Scheme has helped us to not only develop as engineers and designers, but also as people. The experience has helped me to develop teamwork, leadership and communication skills, as well as further developing my knowledge and understanding of civil, mechanical and design engineering.

“Winning the award is a great honour: in fact, to be receiving awards alongside multi-million pound companies is slightly overwhelming, but it gives me great belief for our futures. I would like to re-iterate my thanks to Overbury for their help and support throughout this experience.”

The team have now submitted their application to the Big Bang Science and Engineering Fair which takes place in Birmingham in March 2018. There they will follow in the footsteps of a QE Year 13 team who were named as one of the Big Bang Competition Senior Engineering Runners-Up this year for their own safety project devised under the Engineering Education Scheme, a special helmet designed to save construction workers’ hearing from damage.

Queen Elizabeth’s School is leading the way nationally and internationally in sending pupils to Cambridge University.

New figures reveal that, with 27 boys, QE had the joint-highest number of leavers going up to  Cambridge last year, together with London’s independent Westminster School and Hills Road Sixth Form College, which is in Cambridge itself. Of these three, QE had the highest success rate in securing Cambridge offers, with 52% of applicants offered places, compared to 45% for Westminster and 37% for Hills Road.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This is excellent news: it represents confirmation both that our boys are very bright indeed and that our dedicated te achers deliver an education that is second to none.

“We are proud to be an entirely meritocratic state school, offering able boys from any social or ethnic background the opportunity to reach the very highest levels of academic achievement and then go on to the best universities.”

Other front-runners in the statistics are mainly fee-paying schools, such as London’s St Paul’s Girls’, which sent 25 leavers to Cambridge in 2016, its boys’ school counterpart, St Paul’s (22), the Royal Grammar School in Guildford (24), Magdalen College School in Oxford (23), Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ (22) and Eton College (21).

Raffles Junior College in Singapore was the leading international establishment, with 26 leavers taking up places at Cambridge.

The QE figure was reported by Cambridge’s student newspaper, Varsity, which noted that “certain high-performing schools in London continued to contribute a large proportion of Cambridge freshers from the capital”.

The new statistics show that a quarter of UK entrants to Cambridge in 2016 came from Greater London (650), and more than a fifth from South East England (597) – making them the two most successful of England’s nine official regions for admissions to the university. Overseas students made up 24.2% of a cceptances, an increase from the previous two years.

The statistics also showed an increase in the proportion of acceptances from state schools, which rose to 62.5%.

The work of emerging artist Henry Yang will be on display this month at an East End exhibition focusing on colour and form.

Henry (OE 2005–2012) has studied at Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Art. Both colleges are part of the University of the Arts London, where he took a First in Fine Art last year.

He and three other rising artists are self-curating the exhibition, Primary, which takes place at 103 Murray Grove, close to Shoreditch Park. It is co-curated by Rut Blees Luxemburg, reader in Urban Aesthetics at the Royal College of Arts.

Visitors will be able to see two of Henry’s paintings, Cherry Blossom and Hydrangea – both 1 sq m canvases in oil painted this year. The stained-glass window in the former “represents the light of truth and evokes religious ideology in connection to the Divine Light,” Henry explains.

“My early interest in art and image-making came through a period in which I was experiencing cultural change,” he says. Born in Shenzhen, Ch ina, Henry arrived in London in 2001. “My formative years involved an exposure to a wide variety of cultures and visual media. These constant changes in surroundings left a yearning for something solid; the still image made an appeal. The juxtaposition of cultural tastes and styles would later become elements in these images.

“Through my development during my studies at Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Art, my interest in curiosities, scientific ideology and philosophical discourses led me to explore the ideas of faith and religion in the 21st Century. With scientific and technological advancements leading the way in which people perceive our reality, repeated patterns, coincidences and chance occurrences, surfaced as an interest.”

A common theme running through his work is that of the mathematical φ Phi, the source ratio which was defined in the 3rd Century BC by Euclid in his treatise, Elements, and later expanded upon by the Italian mathematician, Luca Pacioli (1445–1517) in De Divina Proportione. “Often described as God's fingerprint, Phi, along with Pi, another irrational number, appears as a repeated fundamental pattern in the universe,” Henry adds.

The exhibition presents a dialogue between different interpretations surrounding colour and form, highlighting current contemporary practice in the media of image-making and sculpture, with particular attention drawn to arrangement and collage, as well as to the aesthetic qualities of shape and colour.

Henry’s artistic talent was already evident when he was at QE: two of his paintings still have pride of place on the Headmaster’s study walls.

“QE allowed me to engage and experiment with imagery and art, allowing me to form a diverse and concise foundation in preparation for my studies in art further afield. As such I remain grateful and indebted to the School,” said Henry. He paid tribute especially to the “excellent guidance and tutelage” of his Art teachers, Stephen Buckeridge and Ashley West.

At A-level, he studied History, Art, Chemistry and Physics, also taking up the opportunity to study Photography and Art in Year 13.
Henry lives and works in London. In his spare time, he plays 11, 8 and 5-a-side football on 4G artificial grass surfaces.

Primary runs from 9th–13th September at 103 Murray Grove, N1 7QF.

Having made his name as a television executive, Old Elizabethan David Lowen is now a sought-after consultant working with international broadcasters – and he has emerged as a significant figure in the world of higher education, too.

David (OE 1957–1964) went from QE to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read Economics from 1964 to 1967. He initially worked as an economist for the National Westminster Bank in the City, before training as a journalist with the Kent Messenger Group, acting as Group Business Editor and sub-editor at the launch of the company’s daily evening paper.

A highly successful 30-year career with ITV followed, and he has since cemented that reputation through his work as a consultant adviser to broadcasters, programme-makers and financial institutions. Today he is an Honorary Fellow of the college and chaired its alumni organisation, the Emmanuel Society, for 17 years. He is also: a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Honorary Secretary and a longstanding trustee of the Royal Television Society; a member of the English Speaking Union, and a Friend of the British Library and of St John’s Smith Square.

David is Chair of Leeds Beckett University, which has 25,000 students and 3,000 staff. Since May 2017, he has been Deputy Chair of the Committee of University Chairs and is, he says, “taking an active part in the new regulatory framework of higher education”.

During his three decades with ITV, David enjoyed success variously as an award-winning programme producer, as board director of Network Programme Development and, later, as board director of Corporate Development for Yorkshire Television. He went on to lead ITV Network’s digital terrestrial television launch project, the first successful such launch in the world.

A former president of CIRCOM, the organisation of Europe’s regional public service broadcasters, he is currently president of its programme and TV skills awards. David runs International Television and Media Consulting Ltd, which numbers many European broadcasters among its recent clients.

His long record of achievements includes rescuing EuroNews from a funding crisis. He was appointed Director General of the broadcaster, Europe’s most watched news channel, and went on to lead its journalistic coverage of the second Iraq War.

David’s latest TV consultancy work is with the TVR – the equivalent of the BBC in Romania – which has had severe financial issues. “It has lost its licence fee and is now directly funded by government – so heading back to the old days of ‘state broadcaster’, perhaps.” He characterises this work as “a tough call” and a “challenge”.

Other assignments have been diverse. He has worked with Russian free-to-air channel, Rossiya, to help it re-brand, create and buy new programme formats, and re-structure its production and management for a digital future. And he helped Ultach Trust, the Irish language lobby group, with its submission to Ofcom on encouraging the Irish language in programming in Northern Ireland.

David was Chairman of SysMedia Group plc, which recently sold its worldwide software development and subtitling business to a US-backed company. He is also part-owner and director of Format Futures, a TV content ‘ideas factory’. In addition, he is a non-executive director of a local station and advises a corporate finance group on mergers and acquisitions in the media sector.

More than five decades after leaving QE, David is still a keen cricketer, although he says the misery of contending with the Blackwall Tunnel traffic as he travelled from his south London home back to Southgate finally proved too much, so he is now playing for Kent Over 60s – debuting for the county against Hertfordshire in Potters Bar! – and for a village team in the Kent League. He is a member of The Lord’s Taverners and Middlesex County Cricket Club.

David made a “rare reappearance” at the School for the OE Dinner in 2016. He is pictured with Headmaster Neil Enright. “I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with John Symons, Richard Newton, John Keeley, Peter Vokes and others and catching up on news. Must do it again!”

He has written two books – one on survival in the wild for children, based on his network ITV series, and one on self-defence for women.

David is married and has a son, James, and a daughter, Amy.

A book written by James, A Summer of British Wildlife, was named Travel Guide Book of the Year by writers in the Travel Media Awards in 2016. James has five books published – on topics from badgers to Antarctica – and three more on the way. He is married to a former Deputy Ambassador to Argentina and they have one daughter, Maya, aged seven.

Amy, is an executive with Apple and is married to an actor and stand-up comedian.

Well over 100 of QE’s youngest boys took part in national competitions open only to the UK’s mathematical &ea cute;lite towards the end of last term.

Twenty-eight boys from Years 7 and 8 were invited to participate in the UK Mathematics Trust’s 2017 Junior Olympiad and a further 88 in the Junior Kangaroo: these are the follow-on rounds from the  Junior Maths Challenge.

Six boys won medals in the Olympiad, headed by Dan Suciu, of Year 8, who gained gold with this score of 58 out of 70.  Year 8 boy Abhinav Santhiramohan received a silver distinction medal with his score of 48, while Year 8 pupil Bakri Abubakar, Mukund Soni and Ruixuan Wu, both of Year 7, each took bronze.  A further 21 boys achieved a merit certificate.  “I never thought I would get a medal as I was in set 3 when I was in Year 7,” said Bakri.

Congratulating all the boys who reached the Olympiad and Kangaroo rounds, Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung added: “Of the 250,000 who sit the Junior Maths Challenge, only around 1,200 nationally qualify for the Olympiad, so simply to be in this competition is a tremendous achievement.”

The Olympiad consists of a two-hour paper of in-depth mathematical problems, to which there are two sections: Section A requires answers only, whereas full, written solutions are required for Section B. Medals were awarded to the top 210 performers.

In the Junior Kangaroo, 29 boys achieved merit certificates, which were awarded to the top 25% of scorers among the 5,400 pupils invited to participate nationally. It is a one-hour multiple-choice paper, with 25 questions, which pupils sit in school. It is thus similar in format to the Junior Challenge question paper, albei t more challenging. Amudhu Anandarajah, of Year 8, was QE’s top scorer, with 123 points.