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Year 12 boys got to grips with ethnography – the systematic study of people and cultures – and used modern mobile technology to help their research during a Geography field trip to East London.

The two days were arranged to help the sixth-formers prepare for their A-level independent investigation, which must be based on an issue related to Regenerating Places or Globalisation. The investigation makes up 20% of the A-level qualification.

Head of Geography Emily Parry said: “These two guided fieldwork days are carefully structured to assist the boys in selecting their chosen topic for investigation.”

The first day was spent in Stratford in Newham, where they explored how the area has changed since the 2012 Olympic Games. Day two was led by Kate Amis, Widening Participation Officer at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Geography. It began with a lecture about changes in East London, before the boys went out to conduct fieldwork around Brick Lane and Spitalfields, basing their research on investigating the question, Is life in Tower Hamlets getting better?

It was a lively day, with the boys engaging in discussions about some of Brick Lane’s most famous locations, said Miss Parry. These included “the Cereal Killer Café, a well-known site for anti-gentrification protests, the Old Truman Brewery, the Jamme Masjid Mosque and the two famous beigel shops”. As well as trialling techniques new to them, such as ethnographies, they used apps such as Skitch to help them annotate field sketches.

The previous day in Stratford was led by Carlo Roberts from Urban Geography East London, an organisation offering Geography fieldwork programmes. Comparisons were made between the postcodes of E15 and E20 (the new postcode for East Village, which was the Athletes’ Village during the Olympics). Qualitative fieldwork techniques including environmental quality surveys, questionnaires and land-use mapping were conducted.

“The boys had the opportunity to explore how this area has rapidly changed and consider who has lost out, and who has benefitted, from these changes,” said Miss Parry.

For the independent investigation, A-level students are required to collect fieldwork data and write an independent report which features independent analysis and evaluation of data, the presentation of the data findings and extended writing. The written report must be 3000–4000 words long.

Four QE boys acquitted themselves very well at the finals of a national Mathematics team competition.

Having first reached the Team Maths Challenge national final by winning their regional heat in March, this year’s entrants built on recent successes by QE, improving on last year’s 17th place by coming 11th out of the 88 finalists. The team, which was drawn from Years 8 and 9, achieved a score of 182 points out of 232.

The UK Mathematics Trust event included a round devoted to Leonhard Euler. Born in Basel, Switzerland, Euler is considered one of the 18th century’s most pre-eminent mathematicians and is known as the ‘father of graph theory’. He notably used graphs when he presented and solved the famous Seven Bridges of Königsberg Problem, demonstrating that it was impossible to devise a journey that would cross all seven bridges in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia) only once. Euler also studied topics including number theory, combinatorics (an area of Mathematics concerned primarily with counting), geometry, mathematical analysis, as well as mechanics, fluid theory and music theory.

The team had won the regional heat in March, thus qualifying, for the national final of the competition at the Royal Horticultural Halls. The overall winner at the challenge was Westminster Under School.

Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung said: “The boys did very well; to reach the National Final is an incredible achievement in itself, as 1,742 teams entered this year’s event.”

In addition to the poster round focusing on Euler, there were the following activity rounds:

• Group circus, which involved working on practical Mathematics problems
• Relay race – a combination of speed across the room and speed at solving problems
• Cross-number challenge, similar to a crossword, but with numbers
• Shuttle, which is a series of mini-relays against the clock.

Calculators were not permitted.

Team captain, Shimaq-Ahamed Sakeel Mohamed, of Year 9, took part alongside Bhunit Santhiramoulesan and Agrim Sharma, of Year 8, and Dan Suciu, of Year 9. Shimaq-Ahamed said: “We had a great day at the challenge and really enjoyed working as a team.”

A record total of 14 local schools took part in this year’s QE Primary Challenge Day.

Now in its fourth year, the event features a range of enjoyable and stimulating activities focused on English and Mathematics, with competition rounds adding a little friendly inter-school rivalry to the mix.

QE Headmaster Neil Enright said: “We enjoy maintaining close links with local primary schools and this was a great opportunity to host a large number of their pupils and staff for this day of enrichment activities designed to stretch and challenge the children participating.”

Assistant Head Michael Taylor started proceedings, welcoming the primary school children and encouraging them to enjoy their day.

The competition rounds included interactive games and tasks comprising a spelling competition, a limerick-writing challenge, number puzzles and logic problems. Teachers Greg Lee and Marco Saccardi, of the Mathematics Department, and Robbie Hyland and Alex Ulyet, from English, each ran one of the rounds and enjoyed chatting to the participants.

The winning primary schools in the various rounds were as follows:
• Limerick-writing: Livingstone
• Logic: Christ Church
• Spelling bee: Underhill
• Crossnumber puzzles: Monken Hadley.

The overall winners were the children of Christ Church, with St John’s N20 coming second and Northside in third place. Elena Print, Headteacher of Christ Church, said later: “They had a fabulous time and came back full of excitement, and enthusiastic to tell us all about it!”

Mr Enright presented the winners with their certificates at the end of the event, congratulating all participants.

Each primary school team was accompanied by a QE Year 7 pupil who spent the whole morning looking after that team. Organiser Wendy Fung, who is QE’s Assistant Head of Mathematics, said: “I was very grateful for their help in ensuring that the Year 5s felt at home and for supporting their teams so enthusiastically.”

QE under long-serving Headmaster Ernest Jenkins (1930-1961) was so strict that a prefect punished a boy for buying an ice-cream without wearing his School cap…on a Sunday afternoon.

This was just one of the anecdotes which three alumni from the 1940s–60s shared with current Year 7 pupils to help them with a project looking at the history of the School. In a special assembly, they recalled a School that, like today’s QE, enjoyed both academic and sporting success, yet one which was in many ways very different.

Ken Cooper (OE 1942–1950), David Farrer (1954–1961) and John Todd (1958–1964) were introduced by Head of History Helen MacGregor. There was an opportunity for the Year 7 boys to ask them questions, which typically focused largely on the disciplinary regime of the time!

The hapless young ice-cream buyer was ordered to write lines when he was caught bare-headed one hot weekend making his purchase from a shop near his home in Southgate. Although the older pupil was within his rights – prefects of the time were authorised to dole out such punishments and boys were supposed to wear their caps even when not at school – the visiting alumni recalled that he was considered by his classmates to have gone too far, even by the strict standards of the day.

The three visitors reminded the boys that the School was much smaller in the 1940s and 1950s, with a roll of only about 400-450 boys, split into four Houses, not the current six. The School was very much less diverse and boys typically lived very locally.

All indoor activities took place in QE’s Main Building, with the hall even being used for lunch for a time after the refectory was bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1941. The lunches themselves were reported to have been dreadful. “The potatoes were black; the meat looked like it had come off the bottom of someone’s shoe,” said Mr Cooper.

At first, all that lay behind the Main Building was the ‘Gun Field’. Later, an unheated, open-air swimming pool was built; boys were expected to swim in it in all weathers.

The whole School met each morning for assembly, addressed by the Headmaster in his gown: all masters (teachers) wore gowns daily, while prefects wore half-length undergraduate-type gowns.

School ran six days a week, with games on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Sport was a huge part of School life and was very popular: the best memories of many Old Elizabethans from that era are from sports on Stapylton Field, the visitors stated. The rugby and cricket were both good, and QE established a very strong reputation in athletics. Fixtures against the top public schools had been established by Mr Jenkins (pictured below), who modelled the School on such institutions during his long headmastership, which extended from 1930–1961.

During his tenure, the strictness of the regime was seen in the use of corporal punishment. The cane was still very much in use and boys could, in the schoolboy slang of the time, be ‘whacked’ for a variety of misdemeanours. The three alumni reported, though, that they accepted this as being a normal part of school education and thought that there was usually good reason for the punishment! Mr Todd recalled going to be caned and being asked to select which of three different canes should be used. He remembered being concerned that it would be very obvious that he had hidden a workbook down the back of his trousers to cushion the blows, although this was, in fact, not commented upon by the master.

While much has obviously changed, the visitors reflected that in 2018, just as in their day, expectations at the School are high, both in terms of behaviour and of academic attainment. A grammar school then and now, QE through to the early 1960s had a good reputation for sending boys to Oxbridge and other top universities, albeit in a context in which only about 3% of sixth-formers nationally went on to university, with most school-leavers going straight into employment.

Although they had very positive memories of their time at QE, the three visiting old boys were in little doubt that the fabric of the School, the opportunities available to boys and the outcomes achieved are all very much better now.

Year 7 will be continuing their work on the History project through the rest of this term.

Pupils past, present and even future all helped make the 2018 Queen Elizabeth’s School Founder’s Day a resounding success.

The day, a great highlight of the School’s summer calendar, included a morning church service and subsequent ceremonial proceedings, before culminating in the popular afternoon fete on Stapylton Field.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This was a splendid and enjoyable day and it was a great pleasure to see everyone, from boys and their families who are set to join the School in Year 7 in September right through to the Old Elizabethans spanning several generations who came along.

“Founder’s Day really brings together the whole Elizabethan family in celebration both of the School’s history and of the strength of our present community.”

The day got off to a stirring start with the School Choir’s rendition of Handel’s coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, performed as the introit in Chipping Barnet Parish Church.

The service included hymns and Bible readings, including from the current School Captain, Aashish Khimasia, and his predecessor, Oliver Robinson, as well as the traditional Founder’s Day prayer, concluding with the petition that “our School may endure as a home of sound learning and of true godliness”.

Guest speaker for the service was Major Charles Russell (OE 1997–2004) who spoke on the theme of service, reflecting on QE’s “rich history of military service” and pointing out that 2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. He went on to articulate how service to others is demonstrated throughout the Elizabethan community.

Major Russell told the congregation of boys, staff and VIPs of his experiences in 2010, when he and a fellow soldier were very seriously injured in Afghanistan, where he was serving with The Royal Gurkha Rifles. “We were on the operating table in Camp Bastion within 25 minutes of the blast, and back in Birmingham two days later.

“Although I wasn’t conscious at the time, I was visited in the intensive care unit by an Old Elizabethan – a consultant working at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital Birmingham who had been a senior prefect when I was a brand new Year 7. The note he left me: ‘To a fellow OE in the new QE hospital; don’t worry you are in the care of the very best.’ Imagine the comfort this provided me and my family – he was absolutely right – this was the cutting edge of complex trauma medicine. No surprise to find an OE at the forefront of his profession.”

Major Russell added that he had been “touched beyond words” to receive a card from the QE staff as he lay immobilised in his hospital bed. “Not only was there a card, but a parcel was delivered containing a spanking new iPad: these had just come out in the UK and were seriously hot pieces of technology then.”

Guests at the service included Major Russell’s father, Martin Russell, who is Representative Deputy Lieutenant for the London Borough of Barnet. Also in the congregation were: the Mayor of Barnet, Cllr Reuben Thompstone; local MP Theresa Villiers and Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School Headteacher Violet Walker, as well as QE governors, former members of staff, parents and boys.

After the service, the day continued, in accordance with cherished QE tradition, with the roll call and the reading of the School Chronicle in front of the main building.

Then it was time for the fete, organised by the Friends of Queen Elizabeth’s, to get into full swing, to the accompaniment of the School Concert Band. Among the many stalls, activities and attractions, the International Food Tent proved as popular as ever – takings for the Sri Lankan curry alone reportedly topped £4,000! These sales helped the FQE raise a total sum for the day provisionally put at around £21,000.

The afternoon also saw the annual Stanley Busby Memorial Cricket Match between old boys of the School and the current First XI. Played on the Third Field at the rear of the School, it was this year won by the pupils after a close encounter with a strong team of OEs.

A good many other Old Elizabethans attended the formal aspects of the day, the fete and the cricket, with some having travelled a considerable distance in order to be there.