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Drama features for the first time in the 12th edition of The Arabella – QE’s pupil-run creative magazine.

Drama joins art, music, poetry & other creative writing, politics, science and foreign languages & linguistics as areas covered, with the latest edition focusing on an overall theme of Expression.

The theme has been widely interpreted by the boys. Their hugely diverse contributihassanons range from a poetic exploration by one of the School’s younger pupils, Huy Bui, of the famous opening line of Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’, through to a coruscating take on the Democrats’ performance in the recent US election written by another Year 7 pupil, Hassan Omer.

The boys were assisted by a staff team including Library Services Assistant Corinna Illingworth. She said: “The student editorial team have once again produced a high-quality publication. There is surely something to interest everyone in its 54 pages: in exploring the theme of Expression, the boys have expressed themselves creatively and in very diverse ways!”

The magazine is named after Arabella Stuart, fourth in line to the throne, who in 1610 secretly married William Seymore, a descendant of Henry VII and himself sixth-in-line to the throne. To prevent any chance of a Tudor attempt to seize the crown from the Stuarts, James I sent Seymore to the Tower of London and committed Arabella to the care of the Bishop of Durham. Her connection to the School is that she stayed for some months in Barnet in the house of Thomas Conyers, a QE Governor, after falling ill en route to Durham, while Rev. Matthias Milward, a Governor and subsequently Master of the School, attended to her spiritual needs.

Anyone with access to the eQE portal may read The Arabella here.

Head Editor Timi Banjo, of Year 12, leads a 12-strong team of editors and advertising managers drawn from the senior year groups. He said: “This edition of The Arabella captures the spirit of creativity, exploration, and expression that defines our school community.”

Year 11’s Soham Sapra got the drama content off to a good start with an essay on the ‘spell-binding performance’ of comedian Robin Williams’ in his voice-acting for Disney’s 1992 animated film, Aladdin.

Here is a small selection of the many other contributions:

• The above artwork produced by Year 11’s Kyaan Syed
• A poem by Danyal Rahim, of Year 10, extolling the praises of sweets and chocolate
• Year 10 boy Nikhil Francine’s analysis of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto
• A piece of creative writing by Elijah Bedion, of Year 7, entitled The Window
• Year 11 pupil Vu-Lam Le-Nguyen’s exploration of The Intertwined
• Lexicons of France and its Former Colonies
• Sixth-former Harshith Sharavana’s account of the work of 19^th-century doctor Ignaz Semmelweis in introducing antiseptic procedures in hospitals and thus reducing fatal infections
• A short Classics essay by Felix Calder, of Year 12, on Is Roman Satire a genuine expression of feelings? A defence of Juvenal’s Satire 6.

Shown here are QE’s gold award-winners in the UK Bebras Challenge – a competition that aims to introduce pupils to computational thinking.

These winners, representing almost three-quarters of the QE entrants, qualified for their awards after coming in the top 10% of entrants nationally. Among them are 12 pupils, from Years 8 & 9, who achieved a perfect score.

QE’s entrants achieved an average score of 179 points – far ahead of the Hertfordshire and national averages of 112 and 106 respectively.

Head of Digital Teaching and Learning Michael Noonan said: “This was an extraordinary collective performance from our students in their first-ever participation in this competition. The gold award-winners now go on to the next round, called The Coding Challenge, which will be held in School on 24^th March – QE’s 452^nd anniversary.

“We recognise the importance of digital literacy and are keen to encourage boys’ participation in exciting computing-related events and competitions through our QE Flourish programme.”

The Bebras Challenge is organised by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in partnership with the University of Oxford. It involves tackling a series of interactive tasks designed to encourage logic and problem-solving.

Distinction prizes were awarded to the top 25% of QE performers in the Bebras Challenge’s intermediate (Years 8 & 9) and élite categories (Sixth Form), while merit prizes went to the next 25%.

Best-in-school prizes went to the 12 intermediate category boys with perfect scores of 220: These are, in Year 8: Vivaan Gupta; Aaron Singh; Rishaan Harne; and Noble Laturia. The Year 9 boys are: Kiyan Popat; Ryan Uppal; Aarush Yadav; Aneesh Botcha; Atharva Rao; Avi Aggarwal; Kian Aggarwal; Priyankan Ampalavanar; Arjun Darade; Arnay Gupta; Advik Gupta; Tahiyan Khan; Darsh Nandania; Aaditya Pimple; and Niketh Putta.

Akhilesh Karthikeyan, of Year 12, took the élite prize with his score of 192.

In The Coding Challenge, boys will be able to choose between five skill-based categories, two using the Turtle Blockly programming language, and three that require a text-based language.

• Twenty-five sixth-formers (18 in Year 12 and seven in Year 13) sat the British Informatics Olympiad 2025 first round. BIO aims to encourage students to take an active interest in information technology. The first round involves problems to be solved against the clock with only a pen, paper and a computer. The results will be released later this month.

Younger boys explored their own family histories during a visit by a team from London’s Migration Museum, while a special session helped older pupils with their GCSE Geography studies.

Before the visit organised by the Geography department, the whole of Year 8 had been asked to interview family members about their own migration stories and journeys.

Then, as part of workshops taking place throughout the morning, the boys used hi-tech ArcGIS mapping tools on their 1:1 tablet computers, mapping all the journeys made by the people they had interviewed.

Head of Geography Chris Butler said: “Many of our pupils’ parents have direct or indirect experience of the process, and we want the boys to celebrate this diversity and include their family and friends through their interviews and experiences within their communities.”

The session for the Year 8 boys ended with a Geospatial analysis of their journeys (using ArcGIS).

There was a session for Year 11 historians in the afternoon, with the boys studying the history of migration as a unit in their GCSEs.

Migration features as a topic in the AQA examination board’s GCSE syllabus’s sections on The changing economic world and on Urban issues and challenges.

The Migration Museum was founded by Barbara Roche, a former Labour Minister of State for Asylum and Immigration.

She believed that Britain’s migration history should be placed at the heart of the national story, arguing for the establishment of the museum based on her time as Minister and on visits to similar museums in other parts of the world – notably Ellis Island in New York.

Since 2020, the Migration Museum has been based in Lewisham Shopping Centre in south London. It has received planning permission for a permanent home in the City of London, close to Aldgate and the Tower of London, which is due to open in 2027.

This will be allied to a network of venues across the UK, and to a digital storytelling platform.

A Sixth Form team from QE fought off entrants from other top schools to win the international Ritangle Mathematics competition for the second consecutive year.

The eight-strong winning team from Year 12, called Pioneers, were the first of some 1,700 teams to submit the right answer to a series of three crossnumber puzzles. After meticulous checking by the judges in the competition run by education charity MEI (Mathematics, Education, Innovation), they were pronounced this year’s Ritangle Champions.

Furthermore, last year’s winning QE team, Flexangle, came second.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My hearty congratulations go to all who have done well and, in particular, to the Pioneers team. They demonstrated consistency throughout the various stages of competition, as well as speed and accuracy in the final round, in the process besting leading schools both from this country and abroad.”

Ritangle is open to pupils aged 16‌-‌18 studying for A-level Mathematics, or its equivalent. This year’s competition, launched on 25th September, attracted some 500 more entries than last year. It involved three stages.

For the first three weeks of Stage 1, one question was released every Wednesday. Every correct answer revealed a piece of information that helped solve the final task.

In part 2 of Stage 1, a question was released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, prior to the release of the final Stage 1 question. Again, every correct answer helped participants to solve the Final Task.

Stages 2 and 3 followed quickly upon each other, culminating in the final Stage 3 round of crossnumbers set by website Crossnumbers Quarterly.

Besides Flexangle, a further three QE teams reached the final shortlist, which comprised 16 teams from 12 schools who submitted completely correct solutions within 24 hours of the Pioneers team doing so.

The 12 included not only some familiar names, such as Haberdashers’ Boys’ School and King’s College London Mathematics School, but also Doha College (Qatar) and The English School, Nicosia (Cyprus).

It is also understood that all the QE teams were in the top 200. The 19 teams entered is itself thought to be a record from a single institution.

The prize for the overall winners included individual treats as well as a year-long subscription to the Integral mathematics support website and a trophy for the School. The prize was presented by John Brennan-Rhodes from MEI during Year 12 assembly.

The winning Pioneers team are:

• Aryan Kheterpal
• Samrath Sareen
• Sasen Kankanamge Don
• Hisham Khan
• Adithya Raghuraman
• Danyal Talha
• Eesa Malek
• Nayaenesh Jeyabalan

Runners-up (and last year’s winners) Flexangle, of Year 13, are:

• Anshul Nema
• Harik Sodhi
• Koustuv Bhowmick
• Joel Swedensky
• Shreyas Mone

The three other QE teams on the final shortlist are:

Los Desmos Hermanos (Year 12)

• Keshauv Sutharsaraj
• Rishik Siripurapu
• Rithul Shency
• Ayan Hirani
• Maitrayen Srikumar

Desi Derivatives (Year 13)

• Adyan Shahid
• Kovid Gothi
• Vijay Lehto
• Dinuk Dissanayake
• Panth Patel
• Rayan Nadeem
• Arka Gonchoudhuri

The Homeomorphs (Year 12)

• William Joanes
• Akhilesh Karthikeyan
• Pranav Challa
• Ram Chockalingam
• Yash Kedia

The Robert Dudley Studio, QE’s new facility for drama and the spoken word, has been demonstrating its flexibility in a string of events. 

The studio, created from two existing large rooms towards the rear of the Main Building, hosted early rounds of the English Speaking Union’s Schools’ Mace debating contest and of the national Performing Shakespeare competition. 

Two events were held there as part of a new partnership with the English National Ballet, while it was also the venue for a special English lesson exploring dramatic imagery and language. 

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “With the installation of audio-visual equipment, The Robert Dudley Studio has really begun fulfilling its potential for helping us develop oracy in our pupils.” 

At the Mace, the country’s oldest and largest debating competition for schools, a senior QE team – including School Captain Chanakya Seetharam, as well as Zaki Mustafa, and Koustuv Bhowmick, all from Year 13 – took on Haberdashers’ Girls’ School. Other leading schools from North London and Hertfordshire also competed.  The QE team won the event to progress to the second-round heats in January.  

For the Performing Shakespeare competition, every boy in Year 8 learns a speech to perform in class. The 12 winners from across the six Houses fought it out in the School final, held this month in The Robert Dudley Studio (RDS). 

Head of English Robert Hyland said: “There are some things which reading Shakespeare simply as words on the page can never give – so much of the impact of his work comes from how performers have chosen to interpret, following the rhythms and the imagery of the poetry to bring the words to life.  

“Year 8 have done a brilliant job this year in not only choosing a wide range of speeches from across Shakespeare’s plays, but in showing an audience how they understand the text in a way which essay-writing can never replicate.  

The top three performers were:  

• Param Jani, of Underne House, in first place with Is this a dagger I see before me?  from Macbeth 

• Sai Rushil Manchiraju, of Pearce, the runner-up, with Hamlet’s To be or not to be   

• Kavin Rajan, of Harrisons’, who took third place with Henry V’s Once more into the breach dear friends. 

 “The standard overall was very high,” said Mr Hyland. “Param’s speech from Macbeth was a worthy winner, allowing the audience to see and viscerally feel the conflicting emotions and feelings that Macbeth is experiencing at this point in the play.”  

The top two go through to the regional round in the Spring Term.   

The special English lesson held in RDS also focused on Shakespeare, looking at scene 3 from act 3 of The Tempest, where Ariel (under instruction from Prospero) is creating visions for the royal court. Some members of the court are responsible for deposing Prospero from his Dukedom in Milan before the play starts.

Mr Hyland said: “The focus was on the language of the royal court as it was expressing amazement at natural phenomena, and then on how tableaux could be used to depict the key visual moments of the natural world interacting with humanity (Ariel appearing as a harpy, the vanishing banquet, and so on).

“We subsequently returned to the language, thinking about the delivery of the speech which Ariel gives, and what key or words ideas come to light when presented dramatically.”  

Finally, the studio’s versatility came to the fore for the English National Ballet partnership events. 

First, a screening for 30 Year 9 boys of the ENB’s and choreographer Akram Khan’s award-winning production of the classical ballet, Giselle, was held in RDS. Then, the boys toured the ENB’s design and rehearsal studios in Canning Town, learning about the many jobs associated with ballet and meeting some of the creative team behind Giselle.   

ENB dancers and a musician later came to QE and gave the boys a two-hour contemporary ballet workshop, testing the RDS’s audio equipment to the full. They explored ways of moving, inspired by the plot, characters and choreography of Giselle – and all to live beats and rhythms. The boys gained an insight into the coordination, balance and agility needed in ballet. 

Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement) Crispin Bonham-Carter said: “It was brilliant to see the studio being used flexibly as both a fantastic surround-sound cinema and then, with the seats retracted, a fantastic dance studio!

“Best of all though was the enthusiasm and energy the boys put into their dancing. Who knows – maybe the next Akram Khan has just learnt his first dance steps? 

“Having a dedicated space for performing arts helps facilitate such work, but also provokes staff to seek out new and creative opportunities for the boys.” 

Year 7 pupil Aarav Kumar has been chosen as Young Geographer of the Year in his age category in the Royal Society of Geography’s prestigious international annual competition.

Having first won the initial QE round, Aarav went on to impress the judges with his colourful, information-packed poster on the theme of Choose Geography.

Geography teacher and Enrichment tutor Eleanor Barrett said: “Aarav’s well-researched work perfectly captured the essence of Choose Geography, highlighting how the subject empowers us to understand the world and address its challenges. His win is a fantastic achievement, and we are thrilled to see his talent and hard work recognised at such a prestigious level.”

Pupils aged from seven to 18 were invited to create posters that demonstrated the relevance of Geography and how studying it can help those studying understand the world we live in and the global challenges we face as a society.

The competition aims to inspire young people to engage with Geography and show its importance in addressing issues such as climate change, sustainability, and biodiversity loss.

With schools hosting their own heats and submitting only their winners, the 1,000 entries received by the society represented just a fraction of the overall number of participating pupils.

In a ceremony hosted at the Royal Society of Geography in central London, two winners and two runners-up were announced for each age group – and Aarav was announced as one of the winners in the Key Stage 2 (7-11) category. He is pictured here with other winners in the various age groups.

His poster, which centred around his drawing of the earth, included several features:

• Brief profiles of several Geography-related jobs, including cartographer and climatologist, under the heading ‘Want fun, good-paying, creative jobs related to the world: look here!’
• A summary of ‘the geographer’s mindsets’ , divided into the following categories: ‘create’, ‘evaluate’, ‘apply’, ‘discover’ and ‘understand’
• Descriptions of the educational benefits of taking the subject, including a look at Geography GCSE and A-level.

The society’s director, Professor Joe Smith, praised the quality of the entries: “The students have clearly demonstrated how geographical skills and thinking are vital for addressing global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss.”