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Year 9 pupils not only found out about careers in STEM and had lots of fun on a special three-day course, but also gained a new qualification, too.

All five boys who attended the Engineering Development Trust’s Routes into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) course in London, prior to social distancing measures, qualified as EDT Bronze Industrial Cadets.

Assistant Head Sarah Westcott said: “This was a valuable opportunity for these boys to discover the breadth of STEM careers open to high-calibre candidates and to find out about pathways such as apprenticeships. The organisers successfully inspired them and made it an enjoyable experience by devoting time to some exciting and creative aspects of STEM.”

The five boys were: Aadi Goel; Ajand Sasikumar; Laksh Sharma; Paras Mehrotra and Pranav Jayakumar.

Over the three days, they attended sessions which included computer science activities, a presentation skills workshop and groups looking at film-making, coding and forensic science.

The Engineering Development Trust, a national charity with more than 30 years’ experience, offers young people learning experiences in STEM-related careers. Its Industrial Cadets framework, with levels from Challenger up to Platinum, allows participants to demonstrate experience and progress in STEM activities.

After the course, the boys produced short reviews of the three days.

Paras wrote: “Overall I found this course to be a very enjoyable experience, as it was a perfect balance between learning and having fun, which was evident in all three days. For example, on the first day at New City College [in Tower Hamlets], we practised drawing on Photoshop and also learnt how to do HTML coding.

“Moreover, on the second day we played many VR games, but also learnt how to make them, teaching me that there is a creative side to STEM jobs. One key thing which I learnt was the variety of jobs that come under STEM, such as the many career options within engineering, including mechanical and software engineering, inspiring me to be open… the possibilities are endless.”

Pranav likewise found that the course gave him fresh insight into the many options available to him. These included apprenticeships: he confessed to not having previously considered these because his understanding of them had been “blurred”.

“The course helped me comprehend the wide range of jobs just in one sector,” he said, adding that it had been a “fantastic experience” which he would highly recommend to others.

Similarly, Aadi acclaimed the course as “an extremely fun experience”, praising the wide variety of activities in which he was able to participate. “My favourite one was the virtual reality experience and the game-coding using the Unreal game engine, because it was fun and also interesting to see the level of work that goes into designing the games we play regularly. Another interesting activity was learning how forensic science works and the different techniques that police officers use, such as heating water and superglue to show any residual fingerprints.”

Aadi particularly appreciated the information and guidance on finding an appropriate apprenticeship.

“All in all, the Routes into STEM course is one that I would definitely recommend for others as it was an interesting and eye-opening experience,” he concluded.

QE’s water polo players are celebrating a successful end to a season which saw both the senior team and U15s storm through to their national finals.

The U18s enjoyed convincing wins over Bedford School, Marlborough College and Harrow on their way to the English Schools Swimming Association (ESSA) National Plate Final, with their U15 counterparts following a similar path. Both finals were held at Northampton School for Boys.

Head of Aquatics Richard Scally said: “All the players in these teams should be congratulated on their outstanding performance this season, as should our talented U13s, who show great potential and enjoyed a long unbeaten run.”

ESSA’s schools’ water polo competitions are run for U18, U15 and U13 age groups. After the first phase of mainly regional competitions, the teams are split into three levels, with QE competing in the Plate competition for intermediate schools.

The School’s U18 team qualified for the National Plate Final by recording semi-final victories of 7-4 against Bedford, 7-1 against Marlborough and a 7-0 whitewash against Harrow.

In the finals, they beat St Peter’s 8-3, but lost 5-3 to Dulwich, 5-4 to Birmingham’s Camp Hill and 3-2 to St Paul’s.

“Unfortunately, therefore, the senior side lost a couple of games by a single goal. Although it is a sign of just how close they were to victory, it only added to the disappointment. Nevertheless, the effort shown was very commendable, and, with many of the senior players still around next year, it augurs well for next season.”

In their final, the U15s played The King’s School Grantham (lost 4-5), Brentwood (won 6-2) and St Bede’s from Bradford (lost 3-4). “The under 15s came second in their group and lost – again by a single goal – to the overall winners, King’s” said Mr Scally.

“The competition in all these games was evenly matched and both our sides performed very well.”

Visesh Gosrani’s career has taken him from the City of London to the tech hubs of Shoreditch, then across the Atlantic to Silicon Valley, before bringing him back full-circle to the City.

Through all these changes of location, there is one common thread around which he has built his career: insurance. “Whilst most people regard this facet of life as nothing more than an administrative pain, insurance has provided me with a passion where I continuously find a new challenge to keep me on my toes,” he says.

Having started out in mainstream insurance, Visesh (OE 1995-1997), who lives in north London, is now focused on the more rarefied area of cyber risk.

Visesh’s family were moving to London as he started his Sixth Form years, and his previous headmaster recommended he apply to QE. Having been accepted, he set about his School career in Barnet with vigour.

In fact, with rather too much vigour, on occasion. He recalls Mr Davis, Head of Chemistry at the time, being unimpressed with the “high jinks” of him and his classmates in creating some explosive mixtures during lessons – “he seemed to think that was distinctly passé”. They had to redo that section of their coursework over the half-term holiday.

Another initiative Visesh was involved in was the creation of a Sixth Form tuck shop. He and a small band of others were entrusted with taking a disused space and hawking wares that, he says, might be frowned upon in today’s society – “not a piece of fruit to be seen and constantly reordering pickled onion Monster Munch”.

The team raised in excess of £1,000 for School funds in the first term, securing the future for this Sixth Form perk. In fact, term after term they managed to increase their fundraising successes, with Visesh enjoying playing suppliers off against each other, as he drove costs down. He even managed to bring some product promotions to the tuckshop.

After A-levels, Visesh studied Business Mathematics and Statistics at the London School of Economics and then pursued a career as an actuary, starting with PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2000.

While it was his love of Mathematics that pushed him in the general direction of actuarial science, it was the Old Elizabethan network which provided him with his first actual taste of such a career, when he spent a week shadowing an OE who had qualified as a Life Actuary and was working for Canada Life. As Visesh saw the importance of the actuary’s role in meetings – from those focused on marketing to those that examined the company’s financial strength or dealt with a complex fraudulent claim – he quickly came to appreciate the impact that an actuary could have across an entire organisation.

After ten years in consulting, he was offered the opportunity to be part of the turn-around of a mortgage insurer, Genworth Financial, at the height of the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

It was, says Visesh, a huge growth experience for him, as the deeper his team dug into the issues the organisation had, the more he found: he realised ignorance can sometimes be bliss. However, the additional intelligence his team found cleared the way for the organisation to be able to negotiate commercial deals to settle its liabilities.

The firm was continually restructuring during this period and, in what was an unsettling environment for most of the staff, Visesh found fresh opportunity as he was seen as a safe pair of hands to take on responsibilities in areas where restructuring had left no leader. Through this, he realised that he was more inclined to a wider risk-management career, and when there was no further opportunity to grow within Genworth, he took the role of Deputy Chief Risk Officer at a Lloyds of London managing agency, being promoted to Chief Risk Officer a year later.

It was then that he seized the opportunity to set up independently. A chance conversation with an old university friend prompted them to join forces and set up an ‘insurtech’ – industry slang for an entity that uses insurance and technology to solve an insurance problem. The insurtech attempted to find a solution to an issue with which insurers had been wrestling – the difficulty in finding good insurance risks for home insurance.

“In a nutshell, we developed a method to identify people’s true potential for risk. In plain English, what this meant was that the method could differentiate between two similar people, one of whom might just pull the door shut behind them when they leave the house, while the other would deadlock the door and double-check it.”

Early on, this development interested a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to whom Visesh was introduced by a friend. He mentored Visesh and his fellow co-founder and then offered them the opportunity to apply their method to the growing corporate cyber risk insurance market.

This turn in Visesh’s career also led to one of his career highlights. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development were recognising the huge potential impact of cyber risk, and Visesh was asked to be a speaker on the challenges impeding the development of the cyber insurance market at a specially convened OECD conference in 2018. The event gave him greater insight into the governmental mindset around this risk.

Another highlight has been his election as Chair of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries Cyber Risk Working Party –  “a research effort focused on understanding the impact of cyber risk on insurance and on the other industries actuaries are involved in.”

Recently, he says, “it has become clearer that the culture and competence elements that are so important to cyber risk are also important to other facets of insurance and that it is possible to utilise these. I have refocused my specialist area to be more about culture, competence and its impact on insurance.” A three-year-old cyber risk-modelling start-up firm has just appointed him to its advisory board.

When Visesh reflects on his career to date, he credits QE with laying two significant foundations: “Firstly, you are the average of those people you spend your time with. Needless to say, the calibre of the boys at QE is exceptional and that naturally spurred many to a higher level than they might otherwise have aimed for. Secondly, there is the wealth of opportunities – QE offered an incredibly varied range of ways in which to participate in School life. This participation was not limited to the few, either: almost everyone took part in some form.”

“When thinking of the advice I would give my younger self or any other QE boy setting out on his career, it is to find a subject and a vocation that you are passionate about. When you enjoy your area, it comes through in your willingness to work hard at it and speak about it to others. Given you spend more of your waking life on your career than anything else, it is important that you love what you do and, even if it feels like a U-turn or change might mean you’ve wasted some of your history, it is better than setting sail for a lifetime of drudgery!”

The OE whom he shadowed at Canada Life is not the only way in which the QE experience has had an impact on the rest of his life: he met, Nishma, the girl who would later become his wife, through QE friends.

Visesh and his wife have been listed in the Asian Power 100 List for the last three years. She juggles her demanding consulting career with her drive to ensure equitable treatment for all. This has entailed opening doors for minorities in financial services, the performing arts and other sectors, and also improving transparency through her efforts to realise gender pay gap reporting. Nishma Gosrani was awarded an OBE in the 2020 New Year’s Honours list.

“I also credit my three-year-old son with keeping me grounded with his typical black-and-white views on the actions of his daddy – and for demonstrating how some of the simplest things in life can bring such great pleasure.”

A-level French students had plenty of opportunity to practise their skills in the language on a trip to Paris that also gave them a grounding in the culture while taking in all the sights.

They saw the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees and the Louvre, as well as visiting attractions specially selected to correspond to their interests in French cuisine, sport and politics.

Head of Languages Nora Schlatte said: “Each day, the students enjoyed guided visits by native speakers, requiring them to understand and ask questions in French: they coped extremely well with this high level of challenge. Indeed, many guides commented on the impressive level of competency shown by the boys.”

The Languages department runs a trip to the French capital every two years, ensuring that all boys can go to Paris at least once during their French A-level studies.

For this visit, undertaken shortly before coronavirus restrictions were introduced, 23 Year 12 and Year 13 pupils headed off on the Eurostar along with three staff: Ms Schlatte; French teacher Gillian Ross, who organised the trip, and David Ryan, Deputy Head.

The party stayed in the Louis Blanc hotel near the Gare du Nord and conveniently situated opposite a Métro station, enabling the boys to reach the sights easily.

A particular highlight was a visit to the Senate (Sénat) at the Palais de Luxembourg, the French equivalent of the House of Lords, where students were shown the impressive gold interiors of the staterooms designed by the famous Marie de’ Medici, a 16th and 17th-century queen of France and patron of the arts. The boys were given access to the main debating chamber, known as the Hemisphere, and were informed about the French system of government.

There was also a tour of the Stade de France, where the students were given access to the dressing rooms decorated for the Six Nations rugby tournament and enjoyed the opportunity to see strips belonging to several French football and rugby sporting heroes.

The sixth-formers were also taken round the vibrant Aligre market, where they learned about the importance of food and drink in French culture and how markets are still hugely popular with consumers.

They were particularly impressed with the range of produce available and enjoyed tasting the cheese and charcuterie, explained Ms Schlatte.

“It was great to give students the opportunity to use their excellent levels of French to interact with issues they are interested in,” she concluded.

School Captain Ivin Jose’s imaginative short story, looking at climate change through the eyes of an elderly, world-travelling balloonist, has won him the top prize in the national Science Challenge Competition 2020.

Ivin’s 1,200-word feature took both the top prize in its category and the Overall Schools Winner Award, judged by Lord Robert Winston, in the annual Royal College Science Union (RSCU) competition. The RCSU is the student union for students at Imperial College London from the Faculty of Natural Sciences.

Feedback from the competition markers lauded Ivin’s “unique” style in a “gentle yet captivating” essay. One marker wrote: “The message is delivered subtly, but without detracting from its importance.” A second marker told Ivin: “It is clear that you are very talented at scientific writing, which is generally a very tricky thing to do!”

Ivin, of Year 12, was shortlisted as one of the three finalists for his category and was invited to the awards ceremony in the Royal Society of Chemistry Library.

Unfortunately, the event coincided with QE’s Senior Awards Ceremony, at which Ivin not only won several prizes, but was also scheduled to deliver a vote of thanks as School Captain. His father therefore attended the competition ceremony in his stead, where scientist, doctor and TV presenter Professor Lord Winston presented the prizes. Lord Winston has been the ambassador for the Science Challenge for 12 years.

Ivin said: “I was delighted and surprised to learn that I had won the awards for both the feature category and the Overall Schools Winner Award.” He won £500, with the prize package also including a visit to the House of Lords.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My congratulations go to Ivin on this exceptional achievement. He is an exemplary pupil, achieving high academic standards and contributing fully to extra-curricular activities, while showing great dedication to serving QE in his role as School Captain.”

Ivin was alerted to the competition by Academic Enrichment Tutor and Physics teacher Gillian Deakin. There were four categories: video, essay, feature and freestyle. Ivin chose the feature category, for which entrants had to cover “what good climate means to different people, and what this means for how we respond to climate change”.

“I chose to do the feature article question, as the blend of creativity and scientific fact appealed to me.”

The guest judge for this category was Mun Keat Looi, a science writer, who was awarded the silver Rising Star Award at the 2015 British Media Awards. He is the author of two books, Big Questions in Science: The quest to solve the great unknowns and the Geek Guide to Life.

Ivin said: “I wrote my feature article titled Memories of an Old World Traveller. I decided that it would be interesting to explore the feature article question from the perspective of an older narrator in order to explore how much the earth’s climate has changed over time, as well as my desire to motivate and inspire readers to action.”

The article tells the story of a 92-year-old hot air balloonist reflecting on happy memories of travelling the world and “witnessing the stunning peaks of the Himalayas, tasting the spices of Asia and beholding the beauty of the Alaskan Northern Lights”.

One of the marker’s commented on this aspect of the feature: “It is very interesting to introduce so many different cultures’ approaches to climate science, and you have done this very well.”

Realising in his old age that the climate is rapidly changing, the traveller-narrator gets out his balloon for one final journey to investigate humanity’s response to the crisis. The essay finishes with the narrator’s thoughts on the comprehensive measures that will be necessary to resolve the problem of global warming.

• Read Ivin’s winning entry, Memories Of An Old World Traveller.