Government Minister Nick Gibb has praised Queen Elizabeth’s School in a special letter following last summer’s record-breaking GCSE results.
The Minister of State for School Standards highlighted the fact that QE was in the top 1 per cent of all state-funded mainstream schools for its performance in two separate areas. One was the School’s score in the Government’s Progress 8 measure, while the other was for the proportion of QE pupils – in fact, 100 per cent – entering the English Baccalaureate.
In his letter, Mr Gibb told QE Headmaster Neil Enright: “I would like to congratulate you, your staff and pupils on the outstanding progress your pupils are making and your school’s high level of EBacc entry in 2018.”
Progress 8 shows the improvement made by children across eight key subjects between the end of primary school and GCSE. QE’s score of 1.22 puts it above every other selective school in the country and in the top 15 of schools of any type nationwide. In 2018, 78% of all GCSEs sat at the School received the top grade (A* or 8-9, its numerical equivalent), which was a new QE record.
The EBacc is not a qualification but a combination of core GCSE subjects recommended by the Department for Education, including English, Mathematics, Science, History or Geography, and a foreign language.
“We want to ensure that every child, regardless of their background, has the chance to study the EBacc at GCSE, which is why I was delighted to see your results,” Mr Gibb wrote.
His letter concluded: “Thank you for your work in continuing the drive towards higher academic standards, and congratulations again to you and your staff for your hard work and professionalism.”
In response, Mr Enright said: “I am grateful to the Minister for recognising the achievements of the boys here and of my colleagues. We are committed to providing a rounded education and to stretching all our boys to ensure they reach their full potential.
“Selective schools are sometimes accused of merely creaming off the brightest students and then relying on their innate ability, but our Progress 8 score emphatically demonstrates that, in our case, this is not so. Despite the already-high calibre of our intake, boys at QE can expect to achieve more than a whole grade higher at 16 than would have been predicted based on their prior ability.”
Lord of the Flies charts how a group of schoolboys stranded on a desert island descend into murderous brutality as they attempt to self-govern.
Headmaster Neil Enright also congratulated the boys: “This was an ambitious and impressive production. Drama offers our pupils valuable opportunities to develop attributes such as verbal confidence and self-assurance, while the experience of learning lines and stage directions strengthens mental faculties including concentration and information recall.”
The book is also seen by many as a rejoinder to works such as R M Ballantyne’s 1858 novel, The Coral Island. Like Lord of the Flies, this features adolescents marooned on an island, yet while Ballantyne’s protagonists largely conquer the evil they encounter, in Golding’s work it is the evil which overcomes the boys.
Golding went on to write many other works, including plays, essays, short stories and poems, as well as other successful novels, including Pincher Martin (1956), which gives the thoughts of a drowning sailor, and The Spire (1964), about the building and near-collapse of a spire on a mediaeval cathedral.
In addition to praising QE’s actors, Mr Molloy highlighted the contribution of the boys providing support to the production: “We are fortunate to have a highly skilled student technical team who have helped bring our nightmarish vision to life on the stage with their excellent visual effects.”
Hemang Hirani (OE 2008-15), who studied Geography and Economics at the London School of Economics and is now working for Barclays, gave a presentation to the select group of Year 12 geographers entitled The role of cities: an introduction to the field of Economic Geography.
coded maps of the USA and India depicting the importance of cities in both advanced and emerging economies.
In his own time in the Sixth Form at QE, Hemang was a Senior Vice Captain. He has previously been involved in helping QE’s sixth-formers apply for Geography places at university.
After graduating, he undertook a number of internships, including three months with Swiss investment bank and financial services company UBS as a Summer Analyst. He joined Barclays Private Bank in a similar role in June last year.
A recent staff training day focused on how to improve information recall. Research has indicated that reading through notes and highlighting are poor revision strategies, popular as they are. As a general rule, the more active the strategy the better: in fact, even the simple act of reading aloud makes a significant difference to pupils’ ability to recall facts and ideas in an examination. Reading through notes infrequently followed by repeated testing is much better than infrequent tests interspersed by endlessly reading. Short but frequent periods of revision are more effective than one long ‘cramming’ session.
so if you pay more attention to one task for a moment, you are necessarily paying less attention to the other. Moreover, trying to learn new facts and ideas while multi-tasking can result in that information being sent to the wrong part of the brain, with the result that it is harder to retrieve later.
Periods of reflection (‘daydreaming’) can absolutely be productive. As I told guests at our Senior Awards Evening, where we welcomed as our guest of honour, Professor Michael Arthur, President and Provost of University College London: “Creativity cannot be scheduled, nor inventiveness timetabled.” Richard Feynman came up with his Nobel Prize-winning ideas about quantum electrodynamics by reflecting on a peculiar hobby of his — spinning a plate on his finger. And without a time of solitary reflection, we might never have had Harry Potter. J K Rowling traces the boy wizard’s genesis back to a railway journey from Manchester to London which she spent alone, without smartphone or even pen and paper.
n this age of always-on technology and Google, some question whether we need to memorise facts at all. A pragmatic answer is that effective recall of information has become more important for schools because of recent educational reforms and the return to linear assessments and final examinations. Our senior boys simply must develop the skills of retaining information. One way of achieving this is to train the brain through enjoyable but stretching extra-curricular activity: the learning of lines required for drama productions such as this term’s Lord of the Flies is a good example. But beyond the drive for examination success, there are deeper reasons for our insistence on the importance of knowledge acquisition. In order to think profoundly about ideas, it is first necessary to have certain content securely lodged within your brain.
On the School website, we also 
A decade later, as global vice-president of professional development for high-flying media agency Essence, he has found a career he loves – and, true to his original wish, he is based some 7,000 miles from London.
“North London is an ethnically diverse community and my school truly reflected its diversity. I appreciate the fact that I grew up in an environment where, by and large, diversity was celebrated and embraced. That may be part of what drew me to the study of languages – growing up speaking Turkish, English and a tiny bit of Greek, then learning French and Russian at school.” [Veli is pictured here as a child.]
His love for languages and literature took him to Cambridge, where, from 2004–2008, he read Modern and Mediaeval Languages (Russian and French). The picture shows him on graduation day with his grandfather.