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Year 10’s Mohith Sigirisetti was picked as QE’s representative at a regional public-speaking challenge.

Mohith won his place in the Barnet final of the Jack Petchey Speak Out Challenge by delivering a speech at QE about his determination to up his performance with the Rubik’s cube – all the while actually solving a Rubik’s cube as he spoke.

The talk – My Journey with The Cube – won him selection from among 30 of his QE peers, following a workshop for which all 30 boys took a day off timetable.

Geography teacher Eleanor Barrett, who is a QE Flourish tutor, said: “At QE, we recognise the importance of oracy: through this workshop 30 boys were able to learn new skills and develop their confidence in public speaking – not something that necessarily comes naturally, but something we can all work on.

“Being able to communicate cogently is important in most careers and helps build social confidence, too.

“Congratulations to Mohith on his performance and the multi-tasking involved in solving his Rubik’s cube simultaneously, which is quite a feat!”

Billed as the UK’s largest youth-speaking event, the Jack Petchey Speak Out Challenge is a programme managed and delivered by Speakers Trust, the UK’s leading public-speaking organisation. It is supported and funded by the Jack Petchey Foundation. Sir Jack Petchey, who is 98 years old, is a businessman and philanthropist who made his fortune in property and timeshare.

The aim of the challenge is to amplify young people’s voices by building confidence, developing skills, and creating platforms for young people to share their stories and ideas to empower not only themselves but each other.

After competing in the regional final at Friern Barnet School, Mohith was presented with a certificate by
Councillor Nagus Narenthira, the 58^th Mayor of the London Borough of Barnet.

“It was a great way to improve my public-speaking skills and talk about something I was passionate about,” said Mohith, who is a member of Pearce House.

Two Old Elizabethan medics are working with the School to trial an innovative education app that uses AI to support both pupils and their teachers.

QE contemporaries Kavi Samra and Paul Jung (both 2008–2015) have developed Medly AI to help pupils from backgrounds like theirs who may not have access to all the educational resources available to others.

They only started working on the business in August, yet already it has won funding and been accepted into Microsoft’s start-up programme.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “We are very pleased to be working with Kavi and Paul as they develop this exciting venture that is showing great potential to support our boys, and other young people, with their consolidation and revision.”

After approaching the School about trialling the app with QE pupils, the pair had a meeting with the Headmaster and with Gillian Ridge and Amy Irvine, Heads of Biology and Chemistry respectively, in which they demonstrated the platform and introduced its teacher mode. “This is where teachers are able to set questions (from a large database, or their own custom questions) to their respective classes for homework, or in a test format,” said Kavi.

Medley AI can then:

• Understand the questions
• Work out how they fit into the curriculum of the subject
• Assign them to a specification point
• Mark the students’ answers.

“From here, the teacher can get in-depth statistical insights into each student’s weak topics, topic by topic and class by class. This then enables them to customise their classroom teaching according to class-wide weak topics and, of course, saves an incredible amount of time in terms of marking student work.

“Both Dr Irvine and Dr Ridge seemed quite impressed and were eager to start using Medly as a resource to save time and understand where their students don’t perform well.”

‘Onboarding’ for the Year 11 group took place before Christmas, and Paul and Kavi will now be working with the Science department. “This will involve teachers setting homework on the platform and providing feedback on what they’d like to see in our teacher mode to help us improve the platform,” said Kavi. “The students will, of course, have access to our base platform, too, in case they wish to do additional learning or practise questions or exams.”

“We’ve always wanted to try to democratise education,” says Kavi. “Medly AI was born from the vision of making quality education accessible and personalised through the power of AI. Both Paul and I noticed throughout our education how people often had advantages from their socio-economic background in terms of educational resources (e.g personal tuition): both of us come from backgrounds that didn’t allow us access to these resources.

“Recognising the gaps in traditional educational systems due to work pressures on teachers and staffing issues, we saw the potential of AI to fill these gaps and therefore conceptualised a platform that could act as a personal tutor, examiner, and classroom assistant, all integrated into one user-friendly interface.”

Paul is responsible for writing code and working on the technical side of the project, while Kavi takes on operations.

After just two months of development, Microsoft admitted Medly AI to its programme, providing Kavi and Paul with mentoring from a business development manager and meeting the costs of the platform up to £150,000. A month later, the project was also accepted into UCL’s Hatchery start-up accelerator, enabling its professional fees for legal, IP and accounting costs to be funded.

Both Paul and Kavi have deep connections with UCL. Paul holds a PhD in Neuropsychiatry from the university, and has an extensive background in coding and teaching. He included AI in his research, on which he has published and given international presentations. He has returned to his medical degree at UCL and is in his final year, completing his MBBS in August.

Kavi, who currently works as a doctor in anaesthetics, completed his medical degree at UCL in 2021 and is a clinical teacher within its medical school: his approaches to using teaching theory in a digital age earned him an Associate Fellowship of Higher Education Award from UCL and he is also one of the youngest recipients of an honorary fellow contract at UCL.

Writers for the latest issue of QE’s Econobethan magazine aim to make sense of complex environmental and economic issues as they look back at the COP28 summit.

The pupil-run magazine, produced in time to be read during the Christmas holidays, focuses on the summit in Dubai, while also exploring wider economic and political topics.

While celebrating progress made in combatting climate change, several of the articles identify potential or actual blockages to further progress – such as the lack of legal sanctions for countries failing to meet climate goals – and look at what can be done to move forward.

Economics teacher Celia Wallace said: “The new editors have done a wonderful job publishing this magazine, and the writers have been amazing at thinking outside the box and providing some good solutions for the problems at hand.”

The latest edition, which is issue XVI, was put together by a Year 12 editorial team comprising Zaki Mustafa, Tejas Bansal, Akheel Kale and Uday Dash.

In their introduction, they write: “Our team of writers have created a comprehensive analysis of [COP28] that is a must-read for those seeking clarity amidst the confusion of global geopolitics.”

In his own article, Leapfrogging Industrialisation, Tejas argues that the developed nations must assist the developing world in forgoing the traditional industrialisation route from which they have themselves benefited economically, and instead enable developing countries to reach their net carbon zero targets by helping them implement sustainable technologies. Tejas even provides a summary of the article in German.

Bemoaning “woefully ineffective” global climate action to date, Saim Khan, of Year 12, traces the issue to “the collective action problem, a deep-rooted psychological problem that means destructive self-interest is allowed to prevail over the greater good for all”.

Akaash Gill evaluates COP28 through a legal lens in his article entitled Enforcing Climate Justice, while fellow Year 12 student Shreyaas Sandeep takes a nuanced approach to dealing with the impacts of the OPEC oil cartel’s activities on COP28 and the climate crisis.

Other articles in the main COP28 section of the Econobethan are:

• What will the effect of a green energy revolution be on the Middle East? by Vidyuth Shankar, Year 11
• Is environmental sustainability and economic progress truly compatible? by Hari Kumarappan, Year 12
• The impact of war on COP28: how the Israel-Hamas conflict has affected global climate diplomacy by Ayaad Salahuddin, Year 12.

The separate Economics and Politics sections feature articles on topics ranging from Rohan Varia’s look at whether Kenya has been successful in balancing the requirements of economic development with environmental sustainability to Year 12 student Andreas Angelopolous’s survey of right-wing populism within Europe. Akheel Kale, in his “brief exploration of agent-based modelling” (ABM) in Economics, looked at the opportunities that increased computing power in the 21^st century has opened up to simulate intelligent agents in order to overcome the limitations of traditional macroeconomics.

Members of the QE Together partnership have now begun editing after spending two days filming in a Barnet primary school as part of a community outreach project.

A team from the partnership – consisting of senior pupils from QE and Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School – visited QE’s near-neighbour, Christ Church Primary School. The filming was the latest stage in a project that the team have been working on for several months to create a promotional video aimed at encouraging prospective parents to sign up for Christ Church’s nursery.

Lead Enrichment Tutor Kanak Shah said: “All the students – our boys, the girls from QEGS and the Christchurch pupils – did very well, and the little ones were adorable!”

The QE team comprised the 2023 School Captain, Darren Lee, and two of the 2023 Vice-Captains, Shuaib Adam and Anthony Bartlett.

Shuaib, of Year 13, explained that the QE Together team had first held meetings with Christ Church’s head, Mrs Elena Print, to map out ideas and plan the key messages of the video.

During the two days, the team thoroughly explored the school in their filming, as well as shooting B-roll footage (supplementary video) to support the visual story-telling at the heart of the film.

“We engaged with children, including those as young as nursery, guiding them to express the school motto [‘Through God’s love, we learn, aspire and achieve; we flourish’] and ethos. This collaborative effort not only enriched the visual narrative, but also provided an authentic perspective on the school’s values and identity.

“The experience so far has taught us many valuable skills, especially teamwork skills – both within our team and in collaboration with other schools – which has strengthened our capacity for effective communication, task delegation, and collective problem-solving. The cross-school collaboration has not only expanded our network for QE Together’s future, but also deepened our understanding of community dynamics and the importance of collective efforts.”

Chanakya Seetharam this week begins his year as the 2024 School Captain, supported by Senior Vice-Captains Saim Khan and Rohan Kumar.

The three, who were appointed by Headmaster Neil Enright, head a team of ten Vice-Captains, as well as House Captains, their deputies and other prefects.

Mr Enright said: “My congratulations go to Chanakya, Saim and Rohan – a talented trio, who were chosen from a strong field of candidates in Year 12 – and indeed to all our new prefects. These appointments reflect the confidence of their peers and of School staff, who all had the chance to vote in the process.

“Pupil leadership is a significant part of the culture at QE and all the new office-holders will be invested with wide-ranging responsibilities and the opportunity to shape the continued development of the School.

“I must thank our 2023 School Captain Darren Lee and his team for shouldering the responsibility of leadership during our 450^th anniversary year with such distinction.”

Head of Year 12 Micah King also congratulated the new top three. “Chanakya exemplifies what it means to be a QE boy. He is kind, and this come across in his interactions with peers. He is exceptionally able, achieving top grades in his GCSEs and routinely standing out in his classes for his high ability. And Chanakya is extremely responsible. I have no doubt that he will rise to the challenges and demands of being School Captain with aplomb.”

Chanakya is a strong musician, while he, Saim and Rohan are all involved in debating and have therefore contributed to the current strength of the Elizabethan Union, QE’s own debating society.

Rohan plays rugby for the School. He also holds the distinction of having played a role during the 450^th anniversary service in Westminster Abbey in March last year: Rohan’s poem was the winning entry in the anniversary poetry competition and he, therefore, read it during the service.

“Rohan is dedicated and determined,” said Mr King. “He’s consistently stood out during his time at QE for his effort and perseverance. He’s also extremely dependable and calm under pressure. In a challenging situation, you’d want Rohan’s steady and thoughtful nature to guide you through it. He has earned the respect of his teachers and peers. I am confident he will shine as a Senior Vice-Captain.”

“Saim has similarly been a model student throughout his time at QE. He has stood out for his studious nature and willingness to contribute wherever he can to the School community.  Having won a superb number of accolades throughout his time at QE, his appointment is a crowning achievement. He will be a superb Senior Vice-Captain.”