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Two of the latest recruits to QE’s team made significant contributions to the School’s achievement in finishing fourth at the 2018 Millfield International Schools’ Chess Tournament.

The teacher in charge of Chess, Geoff Roberts, said: “Joshua John and Andreas Angelopoulos performed strongly in this, their first, Millfield International tournament, which fills me with confidence for a bright future for chess at QE.” Both boys are in Year 7.

“The competition is a 12-board tournament; all our boys acquitted themselves well amongst the élite chess-playing schools from across the UK.”

After two qualifying rounds, the participating schools were divided into two groups, which went on to compete for either the Championship or the Major trophy. Having performed strongly in the qualifiers, the QE team were selected for a place in the Championship section as one of the top six teams, before finally being placed fourth.

The event, which is held annually at Millfield, the Somerset boarding school, is held in high regard by the English Chess Federation. Its website states: “The Millfield International is a unique event because, with teams of 12, schools cannot rely on one or two star players, but need a thriving chess community and team spirit to challenge for the top prizes.”

A leading academic expert on Artificial Intelligence set out both its huge potential for education – and some of the looming pitfalls.

Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner Centred Design at UCL’s Knowledge Lab, took as her starting point in the Senior School lecture assembly the need for deep human understanding: “AI is the inter-disciplinary study of intelligence – if we don’t understand intelligence, we can’t automate it.”

Together with educationalist Sir Anthony Seldon and entrepreneur Priya Lakhani, she is one of the leaders of the new Institute for Ethical AI in Education. Headmaster Neil Enright was among those who attended its launch this month at Speaker’s House in the Palace of Westminster.

During her lecture at QE, she highlighted ways in which Artificial Intelligence might obviate an impending global shortage of teachers – an estimated 69 million more will be needed by 2030. It could, for example, be used in teaching larger groups, releasing human teachers to focus on particular aspects of the curriculum with particular children.

However, Professor’s Luckin’s work takes in not only how AI can be used to assist human education, but also how education itself may need to change in response to the new technology. And in her lecture to the boys and staff, she said that, since AI can learn information faster and more accurately than humans can, there is a need to move beyond a focus on subject knowledge. This, she acknowledged, was already being done at QE, with the School’s emphasis on skills such as problem-solving and on synthesising and understanding the meaning of data.

She pointed to some of the ethical issues presented by the new technology. AI is built upon “big data”, she told the assembly, and it was not only in the area of data security that there were concerns, but also in how representative the data used is. There have been cases where AI has delivered skewed results, such as facial recognition only recognising certain ethnicities, or has shown a gender bias in its decisions. “We need to be appropriately sceptical,” she said – careful about what is automated ensuring that companies and technologies are held to account. “We need detailed explanatory answers when being presented with a seemingly nice solution to something.”

There were specific issues in education which AI was particularly well-suited to tackle: speech recognition might be deployed to help people with disabilities, she said, noting that Google has predicted that developments in speech recognition will be more significant than driverless cars. Yet doing so was no easy matter, because of the ways in which voices change.

In a question-and-answer session with the boys after the lecture, Professor Luckin delved into: issues of AI and consciousness; understanding what knowledge is and where it comes from; the need for AI that can explain its decisions, and how the education sector should be engaged in the development of the technology. She also explained the importance of inter-subjectivity in teaching and learning to make the best use of AI – that is, achieving the right blend between human interaction and machine-learning.

In thanking Professor Luckin, Year 13 pupil John Tan said: “Whilst we live in a society characterised by technology and technological advance, her talk emphasised the importance of the human connection in education.”

In addition to her work in education, Professor Luckin is also working with the Department of Health on a project commissioned by current Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt (in his previous role as Health Secretary) into how AI will impact and can help the NHS.

A copy of Professor Luckin’s book, Machine Learning and Human Intelligence, which was published in June, was donated to The Queen’s Library.

A Year 11 pupil is now a published author after an article he penned through the School to gain a national qualification appeared in a specialist magazine.

Aaryan Sheth wrote a 2,000-word essay for his HPQ (Higher Project Qualification) which was so highly rated by Animal Spirit magazine that it has now appeared in the periodical’s autumn edition, in which most of the other articles are written by academics, theologians or leaders of animal welfare and conservation groups.

Aaryan’s article explored whether it is acceptable “to sacrifice animals to save humans” in the pursuit of medical science. He decided to research this topic on his HPQ course last year because, he said, coming from a household following Jainism, he is a vegetarian who values the lives of animals as highly as his own.

“In my opinion, dietary choices and matters of life and death are very different things, so I wanted to use this essay to explore the relations between the different ways humans use animals, and whether some are more relevant than others, focusing on the topic of animal testing.”

After discussing the pros and cons of animal-testing and looking, in particular, at animal suffering and unnecessary cruelty, he concluded that some animal-testing is still necessary for medical advances. However, he argued that there should be stronger guidelines and legislation to enforce the removal of needless suffering to laboratory animals and also greater investment in research techniques that do not involve animal-testing.

“I really enjoyed doing the research for the HPQ; being able to pick my own topic was exciting, and it was enjoyable to focus on something I’m really interested in. It was nice to get recognition from a magazine too. Plus, I’ve also learnt lots of important techniques to help with research in the future,” said Aaryan.

The HPQ is a standalone qualification that can be taken by students as an addition to their GCSE qualifications. At QE, it is taken by all Year 10 pupils.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I congratulate Aaryan for all the hard work he put into his HPQ project and for having his writing recognised in this way. The HPQ provides the boys with great experience in considering complex ethical topics in depth and I am pleased that Aaryan fully immersed himself in exploring this important issue. This experience will stand him in good stead for the rest of his time at QE and at university beyond.”

Jack Robertson, Head of Philosophy, Religion & Society, said: “There is no exam at the end of the HPQ, but it does count towards UCAS points and is considered a valuable qualification by top universities.

“The boys develop a key set of skills through the course. It is similar to a dissertation; pupils identify a topic of personal and academic interest, independently devise a question, then work over several months to research, plan and write up the final essay. They then finally present their findings and engage in self-reflection to evaluate the entire process.

“The quality of work produced by QE boys has been of a very high standard. Some carried out primary research which involved them interviewing university professors and specialists in fields ranging from philosophy, science and economics to religion,” added Mr Robertson.

Animal Spirit magazine is produced by the Animal Interfaith Alliance, a registered not-for-profit company. Its mission statement is: “To create a united voice for animals from all of the world’s faiths and spiritual beliefs, based on their founders’ teachings, to bring about the humane treatment of animals.” Aaryan’s article appears on page 40 of the magazine.

Boys at Queen Elizabeth’s School make more progress in their first five years than pupils at any other grammar school in the country, according to new Government figures.

The Government league table reveals that QE is the top selective school in England when measured against the Department for Education’s Progress 8 figure, which records progress between the end of Key Stage 2 (the last year of primary school) and GCSE results in Year 11.

The statistics are based on this summer’s GCSE results, which saw 78.1% of examinations being awarded an A* grade or its numerical equivalent, 8/9 – a new School record.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I am delighted at the recognition of the academic achievements of our boys provided by this table.

“Some claim that selective schools do little to stretch their pupils and that they achieve good GCSE results simply because of those pupils’ innate abilities. The Progress 8 figures provide irrefutable empirical evidence that, for Queen Elizabeth’s School at least, such claims are simply untrue: we are very successfully stretching our boys so that they can achieve their full potential.”

Overall, QE’s provisional Progress 8 figure of 1.22 placed it 15th out of the country’s 6,530 schools and colleges in the league table. Furthermore, QE performed comfortably ahead of any of the 14 schools above it when compared against two other Government measures, Attainment 8 and the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), both of which are methods of recording pupils’ achievement in key GCSE subjects.

In fact, the newly released figures reveal that QE was England’s third-placed school for Attainment 8 and the second-placed school for its English Baccalaureate average point score, narrowly beaten in both cases by girls’ grammar schools.

Further analysis confirms that QE’s record of ‘adding value’ is a consistent one: when compared with the country’s other selective boys’ schools, Queen Elizabeth’s has been the best performer for Progress 8 and Attainment 8 in each year since these measures were introduced by the Government in 2016.

Media reports about the extent of divisions within the parliamentary Conservative Party over the Brexit negotiations are well wide of the mark, MP Mike Freer told sixth-formers.

The Tory MP and former QE governor came into School to speak to Year 13 in a special assembly and responded robustly when asked whether he thought splits in the party would prevent the Government from winning any vote on Brexit.

“I sometimes feel as if I work at a different House of Commons to what I see portrayed in the media,” said Mr Freer, an Assistant Government Whip and MP for Finchley and Golders Green. He stated that the vast bulk of the Parliamentary Conservative Party supports the Prime Minister, adding that not only had she been a successful Home Secretary, but that she also knew Europe and understood that good deals inevitably happen at the very last minute.

And Mr Freer had another example of how perceptions of British politics can be affected by the media: he pointed out that although the chamber of the House of Commons usually appears quite empty on the BBC Parliament channel, this was because most of Parliament’s work was in fact conducted outside the chamber.

Mr Freer was on QE’s Governing Body when he was as a councillor in the London Borough of Barnet, where he served as Leader prior to running for Parliament. He spoke to the boys about the true role of MPs in the legislative process and about how to effect changes in public policy, before answering their questions on a wide range of political topics.

An MP’s job is to scrutinise the law, not make it, he explained. The law usually comes from the Government, which is the executive. However, there are a number of ways in which MPs can achieve a change in the law, through lobbying, questioning, building consensus, and trying to amend legislation as it progresses through Parliament. One approach is to hang an amendment on to a piece of legislation already tabled – known in the US as a Christmas tree bill. Westminster Hall debates – for which MPs sit in a horseshoe arrangement intended to encourage non-confrontational discussions – provide another opportunity to influence, he said.

Mr Freer recounted how he had secured changes to the law to:

• Make residential squatting illegal
• Remove ‘poppers’ from the list of drugs controlled under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 (having challenged the Department of Health’s evidence about their health impact).
• Make PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) available on the NHS. (PrEP is when people at very high risk for HIV take HIV medicines daily to lower their chances of getting infected.)
• Extend the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine’s availability to include boys.

“Changing public policy is the most worthwhile thing about being an MP. I’m proud if I’ve stopped one person getting an HPV-related cancer,” he said.

Boys challenged Mr Freer in a number of areas during the Q & A session. He was asked, for example, “how do you reconcile the fact that your constituency voted for ‘remain’ with the Government’s position (that you are whipping)?”

“Easy! I’m a democrat,” he replied, adding that the Brexit referendum was the largest democratic vote in the country’s history and that all should therefore respect its outcome.

There were also questions on his voting record, including one on tuition fees. One sixth-former put a particularly thoughtful question about community relations: how did Mr Freer reconcile religious rights with the rights of other groups, such as the LGBT+ community, within such a diverse constituency. His answer was that trust is built over time as people get to know you as their MP and see you working hard for the local area; this allows you to disagree on particular issues without destroying those relationships.

After the assembly, Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This was a wide-ranging talk and set of questions, which engaged the boys and which will have aided their understanding of the political and legislative processes, not least in terms of gaining an insight into how MPs influence public policy. It is important that our pupils are able to consider a range of political perspectives on the key issues of the day and engage critically with them.”