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Old Elizabethan George Mpanga has achieved unprecedented success – including winning the main Podcast of the Year title – in the British Podcast Awards.

George the Poet’s eight-part podcast, entitled Have you heard George’s podcast?, creatively combines music, drama, news and poetry. It won a record four golds alongside the main prize, as well as two silvers.

There was reward, too, for another QE alumnus, Bilal Harry Khan (OE 2003–2010). Over the Bridge, a podcast Bilal makes with three black and mixed-race friends he met while studying at Cambridge, won bronze in the Acast Moment of the Year category. Bilal took the time to congratulate his fellow Elizabethan, George, on his success via Twitter.

In his acceptance speech at the ceremony attended by celebrities including Fearne Cotton and Michael Sheen, George (OE 2002–2009) said the podcast was “something I was itching for for a long time when I was in the music industry, prior to that when I was just in the streets, just a rapper, and I knew that there was so much wrong that needed to be unpacked”.

He paid tribute to his parents, who were in the audience, as well as thanking others, including his community and his ancestors.

Speaking afterwards, George told the BBC that he first established the podcast because he “wanted to give young people a way to rethink their situation, especially if they’re in the inner city like I was”.

The judges’ citation for the Audioboom Podcast of the Year prize stated: “This podcast showed a level of creativity and craft that was impressive. Alongside it, the entry displayed well-thought-through story-telling which ensured a compelling listen. George the Poet has succeeded in challenging the notion of what can be achieved through podcasting.”

George also won gold in the following categories:

• Best Arts & Culture: “This is a podcast that deserves your time. It felt a little like a piece of art itself – pushing the boundaries of podcast production,” the judges wrote.
• Best Fiction: “The judges felt that Have You Heart George’s Podcast? exceeded all our expectations. It is an engrossing podcast: fresh, original, surprising, moving, well-written with breathtakingly beautiful sound design and mesmerising performances. An outstanding and worthy winner.”
• Best New Podcast: “The judges were impressed with this exceptional, unusual podcast’s bravery and invention. This podcast is unlike anything else out there. It moves between fiction, fact, poetry and reportage to create a new and unforgettable listening experience.”
• Smartest Podcast: “This podcast captures a unique and powerful voice and views which are so often missing from mainstream media. Using arresting poetry to tackle big issues head on, each episode is a rich and mesmerising performance.”

The silvers were in the Acast Moment of the Year and Best Current Affairs categories.

Among the topics covered in George’s series were the Grenfell Tower fire, the 2011 London riots, whether music causes crime and the glamorisation of violence.

In her report on the awards for the Guardian, Miranda Sawyer highlighted not only that George eschewed the predictable and included some surprising ‘takes’, but also praised the podcast’s use of music (“treated with the respect it deserves”) and the “properly high quality” sound design, complete with “muffled phone chat, voice-note pings, computer key taps moving in and around the voices”.

Queen Elizabeth’s School consistently sends more pupils to Russell Group universities than any other school in the country, new Government figures reveal.

The Department for Education analysed data showing how many Year 13 leavers went to the group of 24 leading UK universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, over the past three years. It found that QE came out on top, ahead of other selective schools such as The Henrietta Barnett School, The Tiffin Girls’ School in Kingston upon Thames and Colchester Royal Grammar School.

According to the DfE analysis, 78 per cent of the 421 boys who left QE over the past three years have gone on to study at Russell Group universities.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “We are pleased at this independent corroboration of the success of our boys in securing places at some of the UK’s best universities, particularly since the three-year period of measurement underlines that this was no ‘one-off’ related to an exceptional year.

“It is a reflection both of the hard work of the pupils and of the strength of our programmes to help boys through the university application process: these programmes offer our boys extensive support and are also highly tailored to specific needs.

“It should be noted, however, that, impressive though these figures are, they do not tell the whole story. They do not include, for example, the small but growing number of our boys applying to, and winning places at, top universities in the US, such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford.

“Neither do they include those boys who go to respected UK universities which, for historical reasons, do not belong to the Russell Group, such as Bath, Loughborough and St Andrews, nor those who take up places on highly regarded, specialised degree courses elsewhere.”

Founded in 1994, the Russell Group comprises universities that are research-intensive institutions with a reputation for academic achievement. They include leading universities from England, Scotland and Wales.

Having graduated from Cambridge, Bilal Harry Khan (OE 2003 – 2010) is now back in Barnet forging a career focused on engaging young people with voluntary service in their own communities.

Bilal left QE to take up a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to read Theology and Religious Studies. He then joined CommUNITY Barnet, previously Barnet’s Voluntary Service Council, where he is a Youth Engagement Officer.

At the age of just 22, he already has a track-record of initiating and promoting volunteering opportunities for young people in the Barnet area and is hoping his role will enable him to reconnect with the School and find volunteering opportunities for current pupils.

Notably, Bilal helped launch the recent Give & Get Given project, which successfully provided one-off opportunities for young people to undertake tasks such as gardening, painting and befriending in the communities in which they lived. ““The whole aim of the project was to show young people the benefits of volunteering and that it can be fun. It was great to see them recognising the value of their contribution to voluntary-sector organisations,” he says.

“We offered all the participants guidance through a briefing session into what voluntary work entailed and also gave them speakers or headphones and a special t-shirt as a reward for their efforts,” said Bilal.

Bilal oversees Youth Shield, Barnet’s safeguarding panel for those aged 14-25, which has won awards for its consultation work within the borough. The panel reports monthly to Barnet’s Safeguarding Children’s Board.

“We are currently working on the delivery of a peer-to-peer workshop on healthy relationships, which will cover topics such as recognising the signs of domestic abuse and violence in teenage relationships. We’re always looking for new members and the Youth Shield offers an exciting opportunity for young people to make a difference,” says Bilal.

Bilal’s responsibilities include working on the council’s Participation & Children’s Voice programme, which involves substantial consultation with primary, secondary and college-age children and young people. The aim is to develop child-centred services in the community; Bilal ensures that young people’s views are fed back to Barnet’s Youth Participation Strategy Group.

Following the award of funding from Public Health England (an executive agency of the Department of Health), Bilal is also now working to deliver a project looking at self-harm, including the role of social media in it.

A dozen final-year QE boys won medals in the 51st Chemistry Olympiad, with one, Kiran Aberdeen, selected to go through to the élite competition’s second round, hosted by Cambridge University.

In the first round of the Royal Society of Chemistry competition, five QE pupils were awarded gold medals, which went to just 8% of the 7,036 entrants nationwide. A further seven took silver, which went to 25% of participants across the country.

Chemistry teacher Elizabeth Kuo said: “The Olympiad is the UK’s leading secondary school-age competition in our subject and is designed to stretch even the brightest, so all our medal-winners did very well.

“To reach round 2, as Kiran did, represents an exceptional performance, because only the top 30 highest-scoring students nationally are invited to take part. So, although in the end he missed out on selection for the final four representing the UK at the International Chemistry Olympiad, he nevertheless deserves to be heartily congratulated on his achievement.” Kiran is pictured in the front row, centre.

Run annually, the Olympiad aims to develop creative thinking, and help pupils apply their existing knowledge in new and interesting contexts.

Round 1 involves a written test of chemical knowledge, based on real-world chemistry problems, and is sat in school.

The second round at Cambridge is held over a long weekend and features lessons and demonstrations on new topics from respected academics, teachers and technicians, followed by theoretical and practical tests.

• The gold medal-winners were: Kiran Aberdeen; Kishan Patel; Binu Perera; Essam Rama, and Tharunkumar Muthu Gurunath. Silver medals went to: Bashmy Basheer; Aashish Khimasia; Shiva Pingle; Varun Wignarajah; Tharshan Sriskantha; Rawan Ebrahim, and Mukund Murali. All medal-winners were from Year 13.

This year’s trip to key European battlefield sites contained a special addition – a detour to Versailles, where the eponymous treaty setting out reparations after the end of the First World War was signed in 1919.

Head of History Helen MacGregor said the extra visit proved popular with the boys, for whom the whole trip was organised to fit in with Year 9’s History theme about the changing nature of warfare and to explore the links between World War I and World War II.

“Despite persistent rain and the crowds, the boys thoroughly enjoyed themselves at Versailles and were particularly fascinated by the Hall of Mirrors, where they re-enacted the signing of the Versailles Treaty,” she said. The group also took the opportunity to wander in the Palace of Versailles gardens, enjoying the views of the water features and of the palace itself.

The first stop for the 44 boys and staff on the battlefields trip was Ypres, where they saw the reconstructed trenches at Hill 62, which enabled them to analyse the construction of the trench system.

This was followed by a tour of Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, where the boys searched out the names of Old Elizabethans who fought and died in the First World War. They included Jack Field, who had been the School Captain and was just 19 when he was killed. In the evening, the pupils watched the daily Menin Gate remembrance ceremony, which was first performed in 1928. Every evening, the busy road through the memorial arch is closed and The Last Post is played.

Towards the end of World War II, on the very evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres, the ceremony was resumed at the Menin Gate, even though bullets were still flying in other parts of the smoke-filled town.

Miss MacGregor said: “The boys were clearly moved by the ceremony and took the time to remember the war dead, including the Sikh regiment who are commemorated there.”

Before moving on, the boys took the opportunity to enjoy the scenery and partake of Belgian waffles, and to buy chocolate for presents and for themselves.

The trip was rounded off with a visit to Calais and the World War II sites of La Coupole and the Blockhouse. They walked around the museums there that record the manufacture and firing of the V1 and V2 rockets.

“The museums were excellent, and the boys really felt the evil inside the abandoned Blockhouse, which is still largely as it was left after the Allied bombardment,” said Miss MacGregor. “We saw moving and informative documentaries at La Coupole, codenamed Building Project 21, about the suffering inflicted by the Nazis during the building programme; using prisoners of war and compulsory work units from concentration camps.”