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Although day-to-day use of The Queen’s Library is currently restricted to the Sixth Form ‘bubble’, other QE boys are not missing out, thanks to an innovative ‘Click & Collect’ service.

All younger boys – from Years 7 to 11 – can easily access the reading material they want by first making a reservation on the School’s eQE online platform, and then coming along in their year group’s time slot to pick up their books. This is done from a designated area just outside the Library. They can use the same time slot to return books, which are then quarantined in a sealed container.

The service is proving popular, with the number of book loans – not including e-books, which are available on another platform – already well into four figures.

Head of Library Services Surya Bowyer said that introducing the Click & Collect service had necessitated some big changes in the Library, but he added: ““All in all, The Queen’s Library may have fewer people physically in it at the moment, but that’s not stopping us from continuing to provide resources to the whole School.

“It is great to be able to provide boys with access to the physical books again. And it is encouraging to see so many boys taking out books, even though the borrowing process is a bit more complicated this year.

“The new arrangements have also only further underlined the importance of online resources, and have motivated us to begin offering e-books as well as physical books. Through a separate new platform, we allow boys to ‘borrow’ e-books in a similar way to physical books, and to read them across their devices without losing their place.

“However, whereas some are happy with e-books, others seem to  prefer physical books. It is good to be able to provide both!” Mr Bowyer said.

The Click & Collect service encompasses not only books, but also magazines and publications such as comics, manga and graphic novels. To ensure the new arrangements remain safe, the librarian and boys are all required to wear masks, with hand sanitiser in frequent use.

Earlier this term, the Library also deployed technology to introduce the new Year 7 boys to its services, with Mr Bowyer producing a video to show the range of resources available.

Tony Norman has, he says, much reason to be grateful to Queen Elizabeth’s School, since “apart from getting me to university, the School also gave me my first taste of overseas travel”.

This “taste” consisted of “a third-form summer trip [Year 9, in today’s parlance] to Denmark and Sweden, and later the exchange visits with Dortmund and Berlin”.

And it was these trips, with their opportunities to sample other cultures, that set the course for a career that has seen him live and work in various countries, including Sweden and Germany. Now retired, Tony (OE 1955–1962) splits his time between the UK, Frankfurt and the Moselle valley, “where I own a delightful house set amongst the Riesling Weinberge [vineyards]”.

A copy of his memoirs, Growing up with Germany, which includes his reminiscences of learning German at QE, was recently placed in The Queen’s Library. In the foreword, Tony thanks his “very good friend, Richard Newton [OE 1956–1964], who, with his autobiographical The Borehamwood Boy, motivated, or rather shamed, me into getting my act and my thoughts together”. Like Richard, Tony is one of the BWBs, or Borehamwood boys. He is pictured, top, in the middle, with Richard on the right and his brother, Bryan Newton, on the left.

He opted for the languages package of A-levels at QE: Latin, English, French and German. He and his classmates had been learning the first three since they were 11. They did not start German, however, until Tony was 15: the young linguists were therefore expected to reach A-level standard in just three years.

“This ambitious goal needed something special and a special teacher. Enter K.L.E.W. Woodland or Clue (as in “I haven’t a …”) as he was known to staff and pupils alike. But he did (… have a clue). He was one of the many middle-aged bachelor teachers on the staff, who appeared to have been left behind by life. Disruption to career and life in general was almost certainly a consequence of the war.”

Yet while some of the teachers were a little embittered, KLEW, who was rumoured to have worked with British Intelligence at Bletchley Park and to have been a spy in Germany in the 1930s, was different. “Sure, he had a dry, sardonic wit, but it never came across as spiteful. In his grey suit and chalky gown, you felt he knew his stuff and that he liked his pupils, which could not have been easy.”

KLEW’s greatest contribution to Tony’s motivation and interest in learning German was his work in organising the Easter holiday exchange visits. “Clearly KLEW had his contacts in Germany and made them work.” He is in fact doubly indebted to his old teacher: although costs for the first trip, to Dortmund, were kept low, money was tight for Tony’s family and they could not afford it, so KLEW secured a scholarship from Hertfordshire County Council.

The trips not only featured time in a German Gymnasium (grammar school) and visits to industrial sites, but also more unexpected opportunities, such as the chance to sample copious quantities of wine with the exotic Graf Matuschka, a German count who was the co-ordinator for the 1962 exchange.

“The exchange visits, in addition to experiencing German, Germans and Germany first-hand, developed me personally. As the Gruppenleiter, I was spokesman for our group, liaised with the local contacts and made small speeches of thanks at the steelworks and the brewery, hastily scribbled on the back of beer mats. In a strange way I felt less constrained and more confident abroad than back home in London, which probably explains why I have spent so much of my time outside the UK.” Tony is pictured here with his friend and classmate, Colin Lennard, on a visit to Berlin in 1963.

With the British Council having reported this year that language-learning is still in decline in England’s schools, Tony, who recently got in touch with QE’s Head of Languages, Nora Schlatte, is “pleasantly surprised” to hear that QE’s German department is thriving. (Twelve boys completed a German A-level in the summer.)

He went on from QE to read German at Nottingham University from 1963-1966, which included half a year in Freiburg. “My main memory is playing rugby for the university and being selected for Notts, Lincs and Derby and UAU Midlands. Rugby shadowed my travels and I also played for Frankfurt SC 1880 and, in the twilight of my rugby career, for Stockholm Exiles RFC.” One key difference with UK rugby union is that the Swedish season runs from May to September: “snow and ice are better suited to ice hockey!

“After university I embarked on what was retrospectively a self-organised gap year, albeit lasting two years.” This involved initially going to Sweden to teach English. “I then drifted into the travel business and was a resort representative for a Swedish tour operator in Dubrovnik, in what was then Tito’s Yugoslavia.”

He subsequently returned to the UK and was recruited as a graduate trainee by the mighty ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), then Britain’s biggest manufacturer. “My final interview before joining ICI in 1967 was with a director. He told me I would be based in Runcorn. As a Londoner, I had no idea where Runcorn was, so I asked him. The answer was priceless: ‘If you imagine the Mersey as the arsehole of England, then Runcorn’s half-way up it.’”

He eventually concluded that it was not the career for him – “Selling salt, soda and various acids in Stoke-on-Trent was not my cup of coffee” – and after some three years he moved back into teaching. He was appointed to a role in charge of marketing specialist EFL [English as a Foreign Language] courses for the Colchester English Study Centre, a subsidiary of Oxford University Press.

“There then followed a four-year period of experimenting, searching and despair, finally ending in 1974 with my setting up my own EFL organisation, Target Language Services, focusing on teaching English to companies and their managers.” Individual managers came to the language school in London, while Tony and his trainers also ran in-house programmes for German companies, such as Bosch, Siemens and Daimler, in Germany.

In 1980, he went back to Sweden with his family (his first wife, Chris, being Swedish). “I sort of dropped out, closed the school in London and focused on developing and delivering in-house seminars in Germany. A senior manager at one of my clients, Schering Pharmaceuticals, then convinced, and helped, me to refocus on personal and organisational development. My USP was running management training programmes in English for German companies with international subsidiaries, which was almost all of them.”

Through learning on the job and imitating the successes of others, he developed his skills. “I started to cooperate with UK-based training and development organisations by delivering their programmes in Germany in German and English. By this time, 1976, I had left Sweden and moved to Germany.”

The 1980s brought two important career developments for Tony. “First of all, I became a partner at Consensus Consulting, which became – and is to this day – the vehicle for my management training courses.

“The second development sprang from a chance conversation with one of the ex-pat rugby players in Frankfurt. He was interested in my now-dormant EFL interests, so Target Language Services was resurrected and re-launched as Target Training. Over the years I have been involved with these two organisations, and still have shares – and an emotional interest – in both companies.”

From 1990 – 2010, Tony developed and ran training projects in the US, UK, Germany, Scandinavia and the Far East. The fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification also presented opportunities in the ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe. If he were pressed to specify what his focus was during this period, Tony says it would have been “international leadership and intercultural communication and cooperation”.

Tony carried on working until his early 70s and today keeps busy through his hobbies. These include music: “I have always dabbled in pop, rock and blues.” He played drums with a band, the Square Pegs, while at Nottingham, and also played the guitar. Family and work commitments prevented him from pursuing this much until recent years, when he started jamming with a number of musicians. “This culminated in the making of my Nostalgia CD and, a year later, my debut and farewell concert, both on the same evening, at the Wienerhof in Offenbach-Bieber.” The concert near Frankfurt, which featured Tony Norman and The Nostalgia All Stars, took place in 2018.

He has two daughters with his first wife, Annika and Katja. Besides music and spending time with family and friends, Tony says “I garden, do wood-carving and try to become a wine connoisseur. Prost! – or, your health!”

Queen Elizabeth’s School once again heads the influential Sunday Times Parent Power survey as the country’s top state school.

As Alastair McCall, editor of Parent Power, points out, QE has now “occupied the top spot for five of the past seven years”.

He also highlighted the “remarkable consistency” of two London schools – QE and its independent sector counterpart, St Paul’s Girls’ School – in maintaining their positions at the top of their respective league tables. If both state and independent league tables were combined, QE’s results would place it squarely among the handful of élite independent schools.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “Our now-regular appearance at the top of the Parent Power table is testament to the outstanding teaching of my colleagues, to the sustained hard work of our pupils and to our unceasing determination to achieve excellence in all areas of School life.

“I would say that our academic performance, combined with our superlative extra-curricular activities, our careful pastoral support and our commitment to ensuring Elizabethans go on to make significant contributions to wider society, mean that QE is not only remarkably consistent, but consistently remarkable, too.”

With this year’s A-level and GCSE examinations cancelled because of Covid-19, the Parent Power league tables were based on 2019 results, but the 2020 statistics were, in fact, even better than the previous year’s, with a record 99.6% A*–B pass rate and a 9.3% increase in the number of A-levels awarded an A* grade to 54.6%, which is another School record.

The announcement of the Parent Power results comes only a few weeks after the Good Schools Guide (GSG) praised QE highly in its latest report, concluding that it provided “one of the most inspiring learning environments we’ve ever come across”.

The GSG reviewers noted, too, that when the national coronavirus crisis struck in the spring, QE had not only been quick to provide boys with extensive online education, but had also progressively improved what it offered. The School rapidly learned how best to use IT to offer stimulating lessons alongside interesting extra-curricular activities and strong pastoral support in the unprecedented situation of a national lockdown.

Mr Enright added: “We have continued to flex to the ever-changing coronavirus situation this term, ensuring that the academic progress of our pupils, their pastoral support and enrichment are maintained. Our established eQE remote learning platform has served us well, particularly as we have integrated it with Microsoft Teams and deployed other specialised online technologies to meet specific needs, such as SchoolCloud’s Parents Evening Video Appointments.”

In his commentary on the Parent Power results, Mr McCall further highlighted that both QE and its fellow table leader, St Paul’s Girls’ School, provide single-sex education. “They provide an alternative for parents when the vast majority of schools are co-educational,” he said. Mr McCall added that single-sex schools continue to do well generally in Parent Power.

With theatres across the land closed because of Covid-19, QE boys revelled in a rare chance to see live drama as part of this year’s Shakespeare Schools Festival.

Year 9 Drama Club members performed an abridged version of Hamlet – and thanks to QE’s year group bubble system, their entire year were able to watch the performance in the Main School Hall.

Afterwards, Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement), Crispin Bonham-Carter, praised the cast for putting on such an engaging production: “They told the story clearly, and it was genuinely moving. Something we will all treasure.”

The boys have spent weeks preparing for the Shakespeare School Festival (SSF). Their work included a special workshop before half-term led by Brian Mullin, an Artistic Associate with the Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation (the organisation which runs the festival) and Gavin Molloy, of RM Drama (the company which provides drama direction for the School).

In normal years, QE boys join other schools to give their abridged performances at a special SSF evening at the Arts Depot in Finchley.

This year, it had originally been planned to live-stream performances, but in the end it was decided simply to have the boys perform live at the School, with Mr Bonham-Carter filming them.

Before the performance, Mr Bonham-Carter circulated a PowerPoint presentation to help tutors explore with their groups the famous revenge tragedy set in Denmark, which in its full form is Shakespeare’s longest play. He outlined the complex plot, which revolves around Prince Hamlet and his fluctuating desire for revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet’s mother.

Mr Bonham-Carter urged the boys to consider questions exploring the key themes of the play, including grief, madness and vengeance, and the complex, multi-faceted characters.

Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most quoted plays, with famous quotations including:

• Neither a borrower nor a lender be
• Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
• There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
  Than are dreamt of in our philosophy
• Brevity is the soul of wit
• Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t
• To be or not to be, that is the question
• The lady protests too much, methinks
• Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest
• Goodnight, sweet prince,
  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

On the day of the performance, which replaced a Year 9 English lesson, Mr Bonham-Carter introduced the occasion, saying that Hamlet is a “play for us all”.

He pointed out that, with theatres nationwide currently lying empty, the audience was very lucky to be able to see actors take to the stage live.

Mr Molloy, who directed Hamlet, said the play had received a great reception from the boys. The audience clearly enjoyed the bloody final fight scene, in which the young Danish Lord, Laertes, kills Hamlet in revenge for the deaths of his father and sister, only then to die himself, having been wounded with the same poisoned sword.

The actors were given a hearty round of applause by their classmates at the end.

“I am so proud of the boys, taking on this epic story and really making it their own,” said Mr Molloy.

Year 12 pupils have thrown themselves into work experience placements this term, determined not to allow coronavirus restrictions to rob them of valuable opportunities.

Many boys have completed placements during the half-term holiday and since – either in the workplace or as virtual placements online – often building on previous work experience undertaken during the summer holidays.

The Year 12 boys have also taken advantage of special career-related programmes, such as the EtonX Critical Thinking course, one of the programme of online self-study courses currently being offered free of charge to state schools by Eton College and the cyber security courses devised by the Government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

Head of Year Simon Walker said: “Many of the placements that our Year 12 students worked hard to organise in the previous academic year had to be cancelled due to the lockdown; online work experience has therefore been an important alternative means of enabling them to develop their understanding of workplaces and workplace skills.

“Students have often had to show perseverance and resilience in order to organise and undertake work experience placements successfully – so the process itself has also been valuable, as it has helped students to develop vital soft skills.

“We are grateful to a number of organisations who, during the first lockdown and since, swiftly developed online versions of, or alternatives to, the in-person work experience programmes they usually run or facilitate – organisations like Young Professionals, S4S [Speakers for Schools] and InvestIN have not only equipped many of our students with valuable knowledge and skills, but have also given a boost to their morale at an especially welcome time.”

Mark Markov was among a number of Year 12 boys who had placements in the medical sphere: he spent four days of his half-term break on virtual work experience with the William Harvey Research Institute (pictured top), partnered with Barts Hospital, and was one of around approximately 20 other sixth-formers selected from over 200 applicants.

“It was an eye-opening experience into the careers which follow on from a study of biomedical sciences in the world of clinical research, with talks from distinguished professors, consultants and PhD students about their career journey and motivations. These included internationally recognised expert in nephrology Prof Magdi Yaqoob, senior lecturer and consultant cardiologist Dr Vikas Kapil, and Dr Shafaq Sikandar, performing postdoctoral research into neuropharmacology – to name just a few.”

On other days, he was part of smaller groups learning about laboratory skills and mechanisms from a researcher at the institute. “The interactive nature of this made it some of the most enlightening laboratory work experience I have done,” said Mark. The picture here shows a slide used to explain the theory behind some of the laboratory work.

On the third day of the work experience, he was individually responsible for questioning and preparing a real clinical trials candidate, including taking a medical and personal history. “This was an extraordinary experience, and … taught me a lot about bedside manner, patient confidentiality, and proper conversation in a medical setting.”

He heard talks from current PhD students and more senior researchers on their work and on new medical tools that are currently being adopted nationally. “These specialist talks also allowed me to affirm the theoretical knowledge I will need to progress in my studies past my A-Levels.”

Siddhant Kansal spent a weekend on a placement with InvestIN, a London-based organisation aiming to provide young people with an experience of some of the world’s most competitive industries.

“We received talks from experts in their fields who told us about the different types of Medicine, the different postgraduate degrees available and how to get into universities to study Medicine. Digitally, we were led through a series of computer simulations of different dilemmas encountered in the medical field, as well as what to do when we first approach a patient. We also had the chance to do some group discussions on the ethical concerns in Medicine, such as legalisation of recreational drugs which may have unexplored medical benefits.

“I enjoyed the weekend, as it was a fully immersive experience, despite the fact that it was done over Zoom. The people delivering the talks were also all highly qualified and accomplished doctors and professors in their fields, and so it was great to see where each career path could take you.”

Angath Makan physically attended his work experience during the half-term holiday at a GP’s surgery. “This was allowed as we weren’t in quarantine,” he said. He shadowed both the doctor and a nurse, watching the nurse complete blood tests and syringing patients’ ears. “I also watched the GP take calls and also saw how a GP worked and how they interacted with patients.”

Angath also undertook some online career training. This was in a very different field – the NCSC’s CyberFirst Futures course, which introduces participants to advanced practical features of cyber security by developing their understanding of cyber-attacks through exploring the reasoning and motivation of common attacks. By completing the course successfully, Angath earned an accreditation with the Scottish Qualifications Authority.

“I just found it interesting and wanted to see what a computer job would look like,” said Angath. “We would join a Zoom call every day and go through PowerPoints and small tests and quizzes.”