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Sixth-formers studying Politics had a ringside seat as the House of Commons debated the war in Ukraine.

The 28 A-level students on a visit to Westminster watched as Foreign Secretary Liz Truss answered questions from MPs and described measures the Government was taking to help Ukraine. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy responded for the Opposition, questioning whether enough was being done.

Politics teacher Liam Hargadon said: “We don’t always have the chance to see the Commons at work, so boys were really lucky to see top ministers debating the great issue of our time.”

Chipping Barnet MP Theresa Villiers, whose constituency includes QE, was also in the chamber endeavouring, ultimately unsuccessfully, to put a question.

The visit to the Palace of Westminster is normally an annual event for Year 12 Politics students, but Covid caused the cancellation of the trip last year, so this year both Year 12 and Year 13 boys went.

During their visit, the boys met Old Elizabethan James Cartlidge MP (OE 1985-1992), a junior minister in the Justice Department. He shared his fond memories of being an independent candidate in QE’s 1992 mock General Election and of hearing from visiting speakers from the political world while at the School.

“It was brilliant to see James Cartlidge again after 30 years,” said Mr Hargadon, who was the minister’s A-level Politics teacher back in 1992. “He has such fond memories of his time at QE and he’s clearly heading for high office. He was so generous with his time.”

During their visit to the Palace of Westminster, the group took in the House of Lords, Westminster Hall, the Royal Gallery and the Central Lobby.

The boys were accompanied not only by their teachers, but also by the three student teachers – Evan Burns, Nathaniel Austin-Mathley, and Ben Duncan – who are with QE this year as part of the long-established internship programme with the University of Connecticut.

The final part of the trip involved seeing political and historical landmarks in the Westminster area, including Parliament Square, with its statues of great statesmen and women, the nearby UK Supreme Court, Downing Street and the site of execution of King Charles I outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall.

Sixth-formers observed striking evidence of coastal erosion during a three-day residential trip to Essex.

The 20 Year 12 geographers were able to inspect two World War II pillboxes that had fallen off the cliff at Walton-on-the-Naze and are now exposed by the sea at low tide.

Head of Geography Emily Parry added that other historical attractions date much further back than the war.

“This coast’s unique geology has fossilised shark teeth and the remains of ancient mangrove forest, which are now hidden within the soft clay. The boys enjoyed searching for (and claiming to have found!) them.

“For many students it was the first time on a School trip of this kind for over three years and they enjoyed the change of scene and of pace.”

During the trip, the boys completed fieldwork to investigate sediment size, infiltration rate and gradient at multiple sites along Walton Beach.

The party stayed in the Grade I-listed Flatford Mill. Today owned by the National Trust and leased to the Field Studies Council, the mill was owned by successive generations of the Constable family and was the subject of one of John Constable’s most famous paintings, completed in 1816.

One of the boys, Abhiraj Singh, said that the visit had brought their Coasts unit of work to life, while his classmate, Mithil Parmar, added: “It was a fantastic three-day residential, giving us a break from the classroom environment and a chance to see Geography in action.”

A QE team’s design for a new London railway station with a strong renewable energy focus has won them first prize in a competition run by the Institution of Civil Engineers.

The four Year 8 boys included no fewer than four different ways of reducing carbon emissions in their design for the new station connecting the Isle of Dogs to the O2 Arena in Greenwich.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I congratulate these boys on a well-deserved success: they combined creativity with sound engineering instincts in their entry and came up with a design that clearly impressed the judges.”

Despite being among the younger competitors, team captain Snehal Das, along with Nafis Meah, Nayan Santheepan and Quaim Abdi, beat 26 other entries from schools across the capital to take the top prize in the I Can Engineer Awards, which were open to Years 8–10. Two other shortlisted QE teams also achieved success, with one picking up a further award and a third receiving a special commendation.

Taking advantage of the new station’s location next to the River Thames, the winning QE team included in their design an underwater turbine to harvest hydro-electric power. It also featured the use of kinetic power from customer footsteps, magnetic elevators, and bioluminescent bulbs. They called their design West Ferry Station.

Jonathan Baggs, Director of ICE London, said that West Ferry was “very creative in its approach to energy generation and how it is used to operate the station”.

The winners’ prize is a behind-the-scenes tour of a civil engineering project, courtesy of civil engineering sector companies, SCS Railways and TYPSA, who supported the award category. Other companies supporting the awards, which were organised by the ICE London Graduates and Students Committee, were Mott MacDonald and Ramboll.

After the event, Snehal said: “Being the team captain gave me many new skills which could help me in my future life.”

Ten teams were shortlisted for the awards, including the three from QE. One Year 9 team, Colin Copcea, Ishaan Ganatra, Krishna Patel, and Rian Dharel, received the Community Award for their design, entitled Cubitt Waterside. It drew inspiration from the recently completed tube station, Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station. The special commendation went to a third team, drawn from Years 8 & 9 –Marvin To, Wilson Xu, and Zoheb Haq – who narrowly missed out on an award with their entry, Dockland Quay station.

Kirsten Evans, a Technology technician and the organiser of the I Can Engineering Club at the School, congratulated all the boys who participated. “The club has allowed all 20 students involved to develop a better understanding of civil engineering’s role in society.”

Miss Evans also thanked alumni who had supported the club by passing on their knowledge of civil engineering, including Karan Dewnani (OE 2006–2013).

The prizes were awarded in a ceremony at the ICE headquarters in Westminster – the first event for school pupils to be held there since the start of the pandemic.

In addition to the award presentations, there were team activities such as tower and bridge-building using spaghetti and marshmallows. The teams listened to a talk about HS2 from Fiona Hughes, a geotechnical engineer with Arup, and to an engineering ‘pitch’ from Julio Lacorzana, a Senior Engineer and Deputy Package Manager with TYPSA, who first spoke about his career journey.

Thirty Year 10 pupils learned about both the highs and the lows of entrepreneurship in a “phenomenal” interactive workshop.

Their challenge was ostensibly to beat their classmates by building the tallest free-standing tower out of marshmallows and spaghetti – but the whole exercise was really a simulation for running a start-up company.

The boys had to negotiate ever-changing rules and regulations, cope with financial ups and downs, and even overcome natural disasters, all of which gave them valuable insights into what entrepreneurship actually involves.

Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement) Crispin Bonham-Carter said: “It was a fun simulation which the boys found tremendously enjoyable, but the overarching purpose was serious indeed: we wanted to get them thinking about all the different aspects of managing a business and to give them the chance to explore and practise skills of entrepreneurship.

“The world of work continues to evolve, such that start-ups and project work abound. Promoting the competencies needed to thrive in such a context, including effective planning, teamwork and communication, is an important element of our programmes supporting careers education and employability skills.”

The workshop was led by Makyth Ventures, an entrepreneurship hub established by Winchester College. Among those involved is the new Bursar at Winchester, Paresh Thakrar, who is an Old Elizabethan – he left QE in 1993 – and has established a connection with Mr Bonham-Carter.

During the morning, while they constructed their towers, the boys worked in teams to buy in not only raw materials, but also expertise. Through the session, things changed rapidly, with opportunities arising to pitch for investment (thus providing more money with which to purchase materials), pay for consultancy, purchase insurance and to forge joint ventures with other teams.

Challenges included storm damage – forcing participants to understand the extent to which their insurance covered their business – changes in building regulations and specifications, and the vicissitudes of the wider economic situation.

The afternoon session was an extended debrief, in which the various issues and strategies were discussed to draw out lessons that could be applied in real-world situations.

One of the boys involved, Pavan Kovuri, said he had expected only a “mundane PowerPoint slideshow” but had been pleasantly surprised: “I personally thought the workshop was phenomenal and an extremely enjoyable, practical, hands-on experience.

“The main tasks were making sure we had a stable building and had a sufficient amount of money left over. We had to choose carefully where to invest and especially had to focus on the decisions we made.”

Pavan said his main ‘takeaways’ from the workshop were:

• Ask questions. No matter how stupid they might seem, ask them. It’s better to ask it now and maybe even be ridiculed; if you don’t, you will regret it later, and at that point, it might even be too late.
• Some people will aim to bring you down. There are going to be obstacles in your way. There’s always going to be something, but it’s the way you react to it and how you deal with it that decides if you’re going to make it.
• Finally, just think outside the box, be patient, wait, stay organised, and coordinate. Being an entrepreneur is hard, but if you push through and work as a team without belittling others as you seek ‘to pick up the pennies’, you will succeed.

The workshop facilitators from Makyth Ventures pronounced themselves highly impressed at the approach of the boys and their effectiveness in the simulation.

The President and Principal of King’s College London had some inspiring and very ‘relatable’ advice for the prize-winners at Senior Awards – one of the highlights of the Queen Elizabeth’s School calendar.

The formal ceremony in the Main School Hall was this year held in its full format, following the pandemic-restricted event of 2021, with Professor Shitij Kapur the Guest of Honour.

Pupils from Years 10-12 were awarded a total of around 80 prizes covering all the academic subjects, as well as a range of other areas, including academic excellence, debating & public speaking, contribution & responsibility and chess. In addition to a number of speeches and the prizegiving, the evening was punctuated by a series of musical interludes performed by the boys.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “It was very good to be able to invite everyone to Senior Awards this year – and what a return to form! Professor Kapur was a wonderful guest speaker, and I was so pleased that parents, governors and other friends of the School were all able to join us to see some of our brightest and best receive their awards.”

Professor Kapur, who was accompanied by his wife Sharmistha, spoke about his career path, which has seen him work in academic environments in five countries across four different continents.

Interlacing the account with words particularly relevant for the boys, he urged them to be brave, ready to take risks and prepared for sudden changes of direction. He recounted being invited by King’s College London to join them for the first time when he was living in America. His wife’s response was “Well, why not?” – and that, he said, is the attitude we need if we are to embrace new opportunities.

He urged the reading of books, rather than blog posts or articles, and also spoke about how we make decisions in context, pointing out that unpredictable events and developments often govern that context.

“Show a passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals,” he said, an attitude he characterised as being “micro-ambitious”.

Alluding to the famous maxim of Apple’s Steve Jobs – “you cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward” – Professor Kapur concluded: “Start plotting the dots, and your life will be a grand story that will only make sense in hindsight.”

The idea is that you’ve got to be able to accept that and roll with it, being ambitious in terms of shorter-term goals and doing whatever you are doing now with pride, he explained.

In his speech, the Headmaster highlighted a number of qualities of effective leadership, including bravery, hard work, high standards, low tolerance of bad behaviour, and kindness.

Examples of poor leadership are legion, Mr Enright said. “This is why images of President Zelensky on the streets of Kyiv, or Her Majesty The Queen sat alone, socially distanced, at her husband’s funeral, have resonated, moved and inspired so strongly.”

Turning to the prize-winners, he added: “Boys, you’ve set your own high standards, so endeavour to stick to them or raise them still further.

“Your awards recognise past performance, so try to earn them again each day. Ensure that you remain worthy role models and leaders for your peers.”

Guests included the Deputy Mayor of the London Borough of Barnet, Councillor Saira Don, who also spoke during the ceremony.

The current School Captain, Theo Mama-Kahn, gave the vote of thanks.

Music performed by the School’s senior musicians included works by Handel and the Renaissance Italian composer, Gastoldi.