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Senior boys from QE and their counterparts at Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School went on a litter pick – the latest event in the community-oriented QE Together partnership.

Shocked by the amount of plastic waste discarded in the Dollis Valley, twenty sixth-formers from the two schools decided to take matters into their own hands, heading into the great outdoors armed with protective gloves and bin bags.

Since the start of 2022, QE Together, a new partnership led by the QE and QEGS sixth-formers themselves, has organised a series of successful community events.

Sushant Deshpande, who is in Year 13 at QE, said: “Our motivations were high and we were enthusiastic to clean up the park.

“We managed to collect quite a lot of litter and thoroughly enjoyed the process, with both schools having a memorable time.

“We look forward to doing more events in the future, perhaps even involving more schools within our community.

“We’ve taken pride in giving back to our wider circle and have had multiple successes so far. We hope to sustain these initiatives for many more generations of QE Together,” he added.

Pupils from the two schools have met regularly over the past two terms, organising a string of events and activities:

• Singing at Abbey Ravenscroft Park Nursing Home in a joint visit that built on a tradition of past visits by boys from QE
• Running a joint assembly for Year 6 children at Whitings Hill Primary School, where the team discussed the move to secondary school, including both its challenges and the things to look forward to
• Campaigning together for safer roads.

Crispin Bonham-Carter, Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement), said the QE Together team were grateful to their sponsors, Signature Care Homes, who donated the gloves and bin bags for the litter pick.

Queen Elizabeth’s School has been recognised for its commitment to pupil-led research after three sixth-formers impressed experts at a London conference with their presentation about robot navigation.

Headmaster Neil Enright has now received a certificate from the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS) following the trio’s triumph earlier this year. They were one of only eight groups selected to present their research at the IRIS conference and were then singled out by one of the leading scientists there as her “highlight of the conference”.

In a letter accompanying the certificate, IRIS deputy director Marcus Bernard wrote: “I wanted to personally write to you and highlight the fantastic work of your colleague, Jonathan Brooke [Head of Physics], who went above and beyond to enable students at your school to carry out student-led research…

“It was a real pleasure to meet your students…They spoke eloquently and confidently about their research and were extremely well behaved, I was very impressed. They are an absolute credit to you and your team.”

Mr Enright today congratulated the three Year 13 pupils, Bhunit Santhiramoulesan, Heemy Kalam and Jashwanth Parimi on their success. “They chose the most challenging of the four options available to them – the ‘original research’ option – and then worked hard over a seven-month period, before delivering a confident, well-executed talk at short notice at the conference.”

IRIS develops opportunities for secondary-age pupils to participate in authentic research in schools and organises conferences at which pupils can share their research with their peers from other schools and the wider academic community. Around 50 other projects were displayed at the conference in which the QE boys took part. Representatives of just eight of those projects were invited to make presentations.

The QE presentation summarised the trio’s research project on automating the navigation of robots with limited sensing capabilities. They were given just two days’ notice that they would have to give their presentation.

The project had involved designing and creating a framework that generated minimal-error paths for a robot to take, given some set of points for it to pass through. They used deep reinforcement learning (a sub-field of machine learning) to achieve this, training the robot on generated paths and using a formula they had derived to quantify how good this path was.

Mr Brooke, who accompanied them to the conference, said: “Every step of the process was driven by the initiative of the boys, and it was fitting that one of the guests on the Scientist Panel that concluded the event, Dr Harshnira Patani, Senior Scientist Pharmacology at MSD (one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies), singled out the boys’ presentation as her highlight of the conference, making particular note of their use of machine learning.”

Through working on the project, Jashwanth said, the three had developed their “research and self-study skills, pushing ourselves to comprehend mathematics beyond the traditional syllabus, ranging from understanding neural networks to multivariable calculus”. He added that hearing from people with PhDs at the conference had made him consider research “as a possible future pathway”.

Heemy said: “Taking on a project with a lot of complex research independent of teacher assistance was the main challenge we faced, alongside coordinating the time spent reading literature with other schoolwork and activities.”

Bhunit added: “One of the highlights was being given the opportunity to present in front of hundreds of students and teachers , as well as being mentioned by Dr Patani as one of the projects that she found impressive.”

Old Elizabethan Max Curtis had some reassuring advice for any sixth-formers stressing about making the right career decisions.

Max (OE 1991–1998), a corporate communications expert, visited the School to speak to a select group of sixth-formers.

Reflecting afterwards on his visit, he recognised that the Sixth Form years were often a difficult time in young people’s academic lives during which they are being asked to “make make seemingly career-defining decisions about their future. Hopefully, I was able to provide some reassurance that you don’t need to have it all ‘sussed out’. In fact, there are advantages to retaining flexibility and taking opportunities as they arise.”

After leaving QE in 1998, Max read Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and then took his Diploma in Law at City, University of London.

He has forged a 20-year career in internal and external communications and public affairs, with a background that spans UK Government, FTSE 100 companies, consultancy and the not-for-profit sector. He has spent the last five years as Corporate Affairs Director for MTVH, a housing association with 57,000 homes across the country. Previously, he worked in communications for the Department for Transport, and before that, for Tesco. His focus is on getting teams and organisations to work together to achieve their potential.

Max thanked the School for the warm welcome he received: “It was great to be back,” he said. During his visit, he found time to take a look through the 1998 QE Year Book.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “We were delighted to see Max, and my thanks go to him for speaking to our students about his career.”

For his part, Max encouraged other OEs to follow his lead and get in touch with the Headmaster to arrange similar visits.

Fifty sixth-formers learned just what it takes to build socially responsible businesses in QE’s Entrepreneurship Festival, which was led by experts from the LSE.

The School hosted the university’s LSE Generate organisation for the all-day event.

The sixth-formers brainstormed the skills and qualities needed to set up and run their own businesses. They were also introduced to a range of scenarios and took part in practical exercises where they had to deal with unexpected events.

Crispin Bonham-Carter, Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement), said: “Our new partnership with LSE Generate is tremendously exciting: they have immense expertise and very strong connections, both nationally and internationally. I know our students enjoyed the day and learned a great deal, too.”

LSE Generate supports the LSE’s own students and alumni, helping them to build, develop and scale ideas, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It operates a year-round programme of competitions to win business funding, networking opportunities and other events.

LSE Generate’s other partners include the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Makyth Ventures, the Winchester College-based entrepreneurship group which itself ran a workshop for QE in the 2022 Spring Term.

Matthew McGrath, founder and managing director of of Emissary Partners, a global advisory firm working with investors, gave the keynote address at the LSE Generate QE festival and answered the boys’ questions.

At the end of the day, the sixth-formers even had the chance to get a taste of an entrepreneurial venture – quite literally, since they were all given ice-cream from a new start-up, Persian Kitchen.

Nine Old Elizabethan friends whose careers have taken very different paths found time to pass on tips to young pupils when they met up for a reunion at the School.

All but one of the group from the Class of 2016 (those who started at QE in 2009) were from Broughton House, and so they duly enjoyed the opportunity to talk to the young Broughtonians of today.

They also seized the chance to meet up with some of their old teachers and to marvel at the changes to the School campus since they left.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “It was good to learn that this group still retains great affection for their alma mater and to see that friendships formed at QE really do stand the test of time, even with some of this group having left before Year 13 (including one of their number, Brian Yoon, moving to South Korea as early as Year 9).”

The visit was arranged after one of the group, Alexander Ng, contacted Headmaster Neil Enright.

First stop was a trip down memory lane with a visit to 7B’s form time, where Languages teacher Marie-Jo Jacquin is still the form tutor, just as she was in their day back in 2009.

They then did a careers ‘speed-dating’ workshop in which they introduced their roles and industries, and the key skills and routes into it, to small groups of Year 8 boys. The group included doctors, engineers, a lawyer and a representative of the film industry. There was an opportunity for the boys to ask questions of the visitors.

As well as being taken on a tour of the campus, the group also caught up with some familiar faces, including: the Headmaster; Deputy Head (Pastoral) David Ryan; Sarah Westcott Assistant Head (Pupil Progress); Mathematics teacher & Head of Academic Administration Wendy Fung, and Head of Physics Jonathan Brooke.

The nine were:

• Three medical doctors: Alexander Ng, who went to UCL and is now at Barnet Hospital; David Hao, and Michael Yeung (Cambridge);
• Two engineers: mechanical engineer Lampojan Raveenthiranathan, who studied at UCL and now works for a company which designs and manufactures components for military aircraft ejector seats, and civil engineer Roderick Lee;
• Brian Yoon, who works in finance;
• Prahlad Patel, who studied Actuarial Science at City University, but is now in the film industry and has been working on Season 5 of Netflix’s The Crown, digitally refining the images;
• Lawyer Meer Gala-Shah;
• David Dubinsky, who read Physics & Astronomy at Durham.

Eight of the group were from Broughton, with odd man out Michael Yeung, of Leicester House, made an honorary Broughtonian for the day.