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Adam Sprei turned his back on a burgeoning career with one of the world’s best-known companies to set up his own business – and has gone on to great success even in the most testing of times for the global energy markets.

After seven years with Shell, Adam (OE 1993-2000) was successfully climbing the corporate ladder when, in 2012, he decided to establish Alchemy Energy Partners (AEP), an executive search & human capital consultancy working across international oil, gas and energy markets.

Looking back, he recognises this as a defining moment: “We dared to take a risk and make it happen – leaving one of the globe’s largest companies with a clear career path and stability to start a business from scratch. We have built an ‘industry disrupter’ that has grown rapidly in the midst of an oil price crash which has seen many of our competitors cease trading.”

Despite the demands of AEP and of spending time with his young family, Adam manages to make a contribution in another worthwhile area. “An important subject to me is supporting dyslexia and dyspraxia initiatives – conditions which are very often invisible, yet with life-changing impacts. Aged 21, I was diagnosed as dyslexic and dyspraxic. Having made some progress mastering how to manage this for myself, I am involved with mentoring young professionals and am in the process of writing a book aimed at helping dyslexics/dyspraxics better understand themselves and thereafter realise their full potential entitled Unlock the Gift,” he explains.

At QE, Adam forged a number of enduring friendships. A few of his most cherished memories include: “Air flow football matches at lunchtime which, at the time, were to us as competitive and as important as World Cup finals” and “Seeing a ghost on the back playing field after a concert one evening”.

He also remembers with gratitude the impact that Eric Houston had on his life. Mr Houston taught at QE from 1976 until 2010, when he retired as Second Master. He is now a Governor. “He was the first person to teach me about facing my fears head-on, forcing me to read a 30-line poem standing in front of the class, which, as a bad stammerer at the time, was quite a horrendous ordeal, yet helped build resilience that has served me well.”

After reading Commerce at Birmingham, Adam took an MSc in International Management at King’s College London in 2003–2004, writing his thesis on global gas markets. He has since undertaken executive education at two of the world’s best-known business schools, Harvard Business School and INSEAD.

Adam joined Shell in 2004, initially as a Market Analyst, then an Energy Economist before becoming a Strategy Advisor and, in 2008, a General Manager, Portfolio & Business Development.

Then came the decision to start Alchemy Energy Partners. The contrast was stark: “I was working initially from a laptop and iPhone, and from an office the size of a toilet! We were riding the entrepreneurial rollercoaster from very challenging 16+ hour days to truly high highs.”

“Now, more than five years later, we have been fortunate to grow AEP into one of the globe’s most respected consultancies of its type, working with some of the biggest names in oil and gas worldwide.”

Some 95 per cent of the firm’s clients are outside Europe, so Adam spends a great deal of time on the phone and travelling to the US, Canada, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Adam lists some of the high points with the firm:

• • “Being a truly valued partner to industry captains, and working with companies who have grown from new entrants to industry leaders with our support – those you see on Bloomberg and read about in the FT;

• • “Designing new oil & gas companies, hiring in the CEOs and executive teams and then ‘building out’ the organisations;

• • “AEP managing the organisational build out (for the last four years) for the world’s largest integrated gas & LNG (liquefied natural gas) project (total circa $100 billion investment);

Adam is confident about the firm’s future: “In its first five years, AEP established its reputation and has developed a platform for growth. However, I believe we have not even ‘scratched the surface’ yet. In the next five years we will continue to grow. We will soon open an office in Houston, US, and we will grow further into key strategic markets, whilst diversifying into new sectors, principally power, renewables and ‘clean-tech.’ And this year, we are launching the world’s first oil & gas industry television network and an oil, gas & energy digital and brand consultancy.”

Adam met his wife, Ellie, at the age of 18 and they have been together ever since. “I am blessed to have an incredible wife and life partner, who has always been amazingly supportive, but especially through the early years of building a business and the extensive travelling.

“In 2013, we were blessed to welcome Sadie and Charlotte, our twin daughters, into the world. They were born ten weeks early, with one only deciding to breathe 11 minutes after being born, being kept in hospital for six weeks in incubators – a quite ‘hairy’ experience. My real motivation is to be a good example to them – they are now four, healthy, happy and thriving and can work an iPad better than I can. The reality is, nothing else but family, health and friends is important to me. Time is the only thing that cannot be bought or replaced, so it is important to make the best use of it and to live life with passion and purpose.”

With a business to run and two young daughters, Adam has little capacity to keep up with his many previous hobbies, but he does enjoy keeping fit, travelling, reading, food and wine, getting out into the country to relax and “generally all things family-related”. He lives in the Mill Hill and Totteridge area, “dangerously close to a lovely 400-year-old pub”.

He remains firm friends with most of the “close brotherhood” that he and his contemporaries developed at QE. They include Jamie Binstock; Simon Walton (“now brother-in-law, married to Ellie’s sister,”) and Daniel Travers. “We see each other regularly, share holidays, and Dan’s son is in the same class as my daughters at school.”

When Ishan Kolhatkar returned to the School this term and gave an inspiring talk to senior boys interested in pursuing a career as lawyers, he was setting out a path for them that he had fully expected to follow himself.

Yet today Ishan (OE 1989-1996) is instead Deputy Dean of Education Services at BPP University, the leading private university dedicated to Law, business and other professions.

“Having set out to be a barrister, expecting that to be a job for life, I am delighted with my decision to move into academia,” he says. “I taught advocacy, litigation and ethics on the Bar Course (including to a couple of OEs) for five years before moving into strategic management. I still have an interest in advocacy, criminal litigation (sentencing in particular) and legal education in general. All of which will hopefully turn into some published works and perhaps a PhD,” which, he says, he is “contemplating before the end of the decade”.

Ishan retains many fond memories of being in a very diverse year group at QE – one of the last before the reintroduction of academic selection at the School. Those memories include being part of the Young Enterprise team which became UK and European Champions in 1995, as well as being House Captain.

He pays tribute to “three of the most impressive individuals I’ve ever met. who were formative in different ways”. The trio includes Eamonn Harris, who was Headmaster when he was a pupil, as well as John Marincowitz (Headmaster, 1999–2011) and Eric Houston (Second Master; now retired and a QE Governor).

Ishan is still in regular contact with fellow OEs Anthony Mazen and Ajay Kurien. “I see Matthew Williamson and Manu Sivanandam from time to time and recently got back in touch with Inigo Melis.” Anthony, Manu and Inigo were all his Young Enterprise teammates.

On leaving QE, Ishan read Computer Science at Queen Mary, London, and then took the law conversion course and Bar Vocational Course “thanks to a very generous scholarship from the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple”.

Having worked for some years as a barrister and then as an in-house lawyer for the Nursing and Midwifery Council, he became a lecturer in 2011 at BPP University.

Ishan has “a wonderful wife and two lovely boys”.

Followers of his Twitter feed (@BPTC_Lecturer) will already know his hobby: “It’s cooking. I tweet more pictures of my food than anything else. I had intended to write a cookbook by the time I was 40 but that’s a few weeks away so I’ve decided that 41 is the new 40…”

Ben Swart has spent the past 12 years working for the UK’s leading children’s charity and, after several promotions, is now its Head of New Corporate Partnerships.

But successful as he has been at the NSPCC, for Ben (OE 1994–2001), his motivation is about much more than merely pursuing a career.

“I joined the NSPCC after a couple of years at Barclays,” he says. “While at the bank, I started volunteering with a small charity called Get Connected (now The Mix). I became a trustee and quickly realised just how much support was lacking for children and young people in the UK. I decided I wanted my career to focus on changing that fact.”

So, a month after becoming a volunteer, he left the bank and joined the NSPCC’s finance team on just a one-week contract. It happened to be the same week that Childline merged with the NSPCC.

“To announce the partnership, we were called to the conference room. I’ll never forget that moment. A month earlier, I had sat in Barclay’s annual reviews focused on sales targets, and yet that day I heard Esther Rantzen say this wasn’t two organisations coming together: it was us making sure every child, wherever they were, would always know they had somewhere to turn. I was desperate to turn that week’s contract into a career!”

Ben quickly moved to fundraising, talking to supporters of the charity. Them he became a proposal writer in the philanthropists team, which involved building relationships with multi-millionaires to ask for support in the form of five, six or seven-figure gifts.

“I moved again to become head of fundraising training – coaching and training the 300-plus team at the NSPCC – then again to become a leader in the corporate partnership team, where my job is to lead a department to find, build, negotiate and grow partnerships with the biggest companies in the UK.”

At the same time, over the past decade he has worked with the Institute of Fundraising and with the International Fundraising Congress, teaching charities across the globe and sharing his expertise with them.

“I am of no doubt that QE gave me fundamental skills that got me here – public speaking, writing, confidence, determination. I look back and while I may not have realised it at the time, many lessons were being learnt that would shape my future,” he says.

He recalls a host of teachers who were key to his development, mentioning Mr Clift and Mr Dourmiex in particular.

“Today I have a lovely family, a three-year-old daughter and am still very close to a couple of friends from QE. Marcus Waters was best man at my wedding, and Jon Hart was the DJ!”

• • Ben is pictured at 10 Downing Street, where he was invited to celebrate Childline’s 30th birthday, two days before the Brexit referendum. It was to be David and Samantha Cameron’s last dinner before he resigned as Prime Minister following the vote.

After one brief false start following university, Sam Colman’s career is now firmly on track with a national sales role for a European company.

Sam (OE 1998-2005), who graduated from the University of Manchester in 2008, says: “I was unsure what the best career for me would be, but was lucky to get an internship for three months at UK ad agency Engine. I hated it.”

A keen sportsman who was prominent in water-polo while at QE, he then took a year out to teach climbing and quad biking at PGL.

“I left PGL to take a position at British Sugar, working in the agricultural team, before becoming Co-Products Sales Manager (selling stuff that wasn’t sugar!) in 2012.”

In April 2017, he started work as Commercial Manager UK (Brewing) for Boortmalt, a Belgian company with ten factories across Europe, selling malted barley to both breweries and distilleries. His role, which is based in Suffolk, involves negotiating all UK brewing sales.

Sam read Geography at Manchester. He was among the first at QE to be taught the subject by the current Headmaster, who arrived at the School in September 2002. Mr Enright says he well remembers Sam for his “great wit”.

For all seven years of his Geography lessons at Queen’s Road, Sam sat next to Robert Mills. In 2016, he was best man at Robert’s wedding.

He continued playing water-polo as an undergraduate and, although out of action through injury in his first year, he then went on to considerable success with the university team. “In years 2 and 3, we reached the national finals, winning silver and bronze.” He was awarded half-colours twice.

“I continued to play regularly until 2011, when I moved to Suffolk. I now play occasionally for either Enfield or Hertford.”

Sam was among the Old Elizabethans who returned to the School in the autumn to speak to Year 11 boys and their parents at QE’s Careers Convention.

Saturday, 24th March, was significant for Queen Elizabeth’s School for two reasons. First, it marked the 445th anniversary of the founding of the School in 1573. And second, it was the date of our annual Elizabethan Union Dinner Debate, a formal occasion now in its 53rd year that brings together the School’s present with its past through the involvement of current Year 12 pupils alongside Old Elizabethans.

We will be reporting back to you in due course on the events of that evening and of this term’s QE Rugby Sevens. The continuity provided by the annual running of such events not only celebrates the School’s rich heritage, but also points to its future, as the Sixth Form debaters of today become the alumni of tomorrow and they, in turn, interact with their successors at the School.

Within our history, we have a long record of excellence. We continue our regular celebrations of commitment and achievement in School, such as our recent Senior Awards Ceremony. The excellence achieved at QE is, in its many forms, in part a result of the high standards and aspirations maintained by the School, the parents and the boys themselves. But, of course, there can be a tension between striving for excellence and falling into the trap of perfectionism. For their own wellbeing, it is most important that boys retain a sense of perspective and that they are supported at School and at home to ensure this.

We place considerable emphasis on the characteristics – specifically the skills and habits – required for successful learning. This year, staff are reviewing and fine-tuning the School’s own assessment strategies to provide a foundation for the development, assessment and rewarding of these skills and habits (as well as the identification of strategies to support those students who are not effective at developing them). I have been suggesting to parents that they can play their part by encouraging their sons to participate in our very wide range of enrichment activities – including sports, the arts and volunteering – to ensure boys at QE are well-rounded and broadly accomplished, thus reducing the risk of their becoming narrow or obsessive.

We now very regularly invite expert speakers, many of them alumni, to speak to the boys through our lecture programmes and on other occasions. Their often-sage advice is another invaluable help in combatting perfectionism. It is striking how frequently highly accomplished speakers refer to the setbacks they have suffered, or describe situations in which a failure became serendipitous for a future success. Entrepreneurs are always talking about the importance of failing as a means of learning. And one recent Old Elizabethan speaker, Jake Green (1992–1997) explained that he was rejected by a particular law firm after university, but has since become a partner there, following experience elsewhere.

Other OE visitors to the School this term have included 2017 leaver Ché Applewhaite – who took a break from his first year at Harvard to speak to Year 12 boys interested in applying to Ivy League universities – and entrepreneur Akshay Ruparelia (2009-2016), reportedly the country’s youngest self-made millionaire at 19 through the success of his online estate agency, Doorsteps.co.uk.

A new development in the Sixth Form this year has been the QE-USP enrichment option, a modular course designed to allow Year 12 pupils to enhance their skills in putting together the best possible university application – which means one in which the laudable quality of academic ambition is nonetheless tempered by realism and pitched according to each boy’s abilities. (The ‘USP’ aspect stands both for University admissions Support Programme and for Unique Selling Point.) Then there is the continuing development of QE Connect, our initiative that matches current pupils with alumni who can provide them with specific help in setting and then pursuing their university and career aspirations.

Excellence abounds at this School. I am pleased to be able to state that this year, our sixth-formers have received 28 Oxbridge offers, including 12 from Oxford, which is now closing in on Cambridge, for which there are 16 offers. The Oxford figure is a record, certainly in recent years, and a feat that was happily timed for the visit of Professor Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, as Guest of Honour at our 2018 Senior Awards. Other examples of excellence this term include our success in the Mathematics and Physics Olympiads, our robotics teams qualifying for the World Championship in the US and those boys who delighted audiences in this term’s Music performances and in the School Play, The 39 Steps.

My warmest wishes go to all Old Elizabethans.

Neil Enright