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Ian Stern has risen to the very top of the legal profession, forging his reputation as a leading Queen’s Counsel in some of the country’s highest-profile court cases of the 21st century.

Ian (OE 1968–1975) returned to QE this term for a meeting with the Headmaster and, since he is keen to support the development of advocacy skills in schoolchildren, has agreed to host a visit to the crown court by the School’s entrants in this year’s Magistrates’ Court Mock Trial competition.
(In addition to his work as a barrister, he sits as a Recorder of the Crown Court, that is, a part-time judge.)

After leaving QE, Ian read Politics at Warwick and then went on to gain his Diploma in Law from City University. He was called to the Bar in 1983 and became a Recorder in 2000. He took silk (gained the award of Queen’s Counsel) in 2006.

His specialisms include professional discipline, judicial reviews, cases of murder & manslaughter and of fraud, coroners’ inquests and High Court appeals. Ian’s Chambers, 2 Bedford Row, are ranked in band 1 for professional discipline and band 2 for crime. He is a member both of the London Bar and the New South Wales Bar in Australia and is the Head of Chambers Regulatory team.

In 2014, Ian was named Professional Discipline Silk of the Year by the legal directory, Chambers & Partners. He has been involved in a large number of cases in this field, including conducting the Andrew Mitchell ‘Plebgate’ misconduct hearings on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. Recent cases include that of Dr Lyndsey Thomas, who faced an allegation of gross negligence manslaughter arising from the death of a patient. Mrs Justice Nicola Davies allowed the submission of ‘no case to answer’ put forward by the defence, which Ian led.

He also has been at the forefront of several high-profile inquests in which he represented armed police officers. These include:

• Mark Duggan: The 2013–2014 inquest followed the death which started the London riots. (Ian was also involved in the judicial review launched by Mr Duggan’s mother, Pamela, following the inquest’s verdict of lawful killing
• Jean Charles de Menezes: Ian represented the officers who fired the shots that killed Mr de Menezes on 22nd July 2005 at Stockwell Underground Station after he was wrongly identified as a fugitive terrorist involved in the previous day’s failed bombing attempts.
• Chandler’s Ford robbery: He represented the officers who fatally shot two men as they robbed a security guard outside a bank in the Hampshire town.

Among the murder cases he has been involved in is last year’s Old Bailey trial of retired specialist firearms officer Anthony Long, who was accused of the murder of Azelle Rodney, a 24-year-old suspected armed robber. Mr Long, whom Ian represented, was acquitted.

Chambers and Partners is fulsome in its praise, bestowing on him plaudits including:

• “A highly regarded silk who is consistently involved in the highest-profile and most complex regulatory cases. His expertise covers a breadth of areas, and he is particularly regarded for his knowledge on police and healthcare disciplinary matters.
• “Instructed by top solicitors and major prosecuting authorities alike” he is armed with “bags of common sense” and “excellent judgment” and has “the ability to handle the most complex of fraud trials”
• “Impressive advocate with a measured style and a delicate touch who always makes the right decisions”
• “Absolutely first class” and a silk “who will fight his corner for the client”
• He is noted for his advocacy, and for his ability to win over clients by “dealing with them with the necessary level of respect for their professionalism”.

Having graduated from Cambridge, Bilal Harry Khan (OE 2003 – 2010) is now back in Barnet forging a career focused on engaging young people with voluntary service in their own communities.

Bilal left QE to take up a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to read Theology and Religious Studies. He then joined CommUNITY Barnet, previously Barnet’s Voluntary Service Council, where he is a Youth Engagement Officer.

At the age of just 22, he already has a track-record of initiating and promoting volunteering opportunities for young people in the Barnet area and is hoping his role will enable him to reconnect with the School and find volunteering opportunities for current pupils.

Notably, Bilal helped launch the recent Give & Get Given project, which successfully provided one-off opportunities for young people to undertake tasks such as gardening, painting and befriending in the communities in which they lived. ““The whole aim of the project was to show young people the benefits of volunteering and that it can be fun. It was great to see them recognising the value of their contribution to voluntary-sector organisations,” he says.

“We offered all the participants guidance through a briefing session into what voluntary work entailed and also gave them speakers or headphones and a special t-shirt as a reward for their efforts,” said Bilal.

Bilal oversees Youth Shield, Barnet’s safeguarding panel for those aged 14-25, which has won awards for its consultation work within the borough. The panel reports monthly to Barnet’s Safeguarding Children’s Board.

“We are currently working on the delivery of a peer-to-peer workshop on healthy relationships, which will cover topics such as recognising the signs of domestic abuse and violence in teenage relationships. We’re always looking for new members and the Youth Shield offers an exciting opportunity for young people to make a difference,” says Bilal.

Bilal’s responsibilities include working on the council’s Participation & Children’s Voice programme, which involves substantial consultation with primary, secondary and college-age children and young people. The aim is to develop child-centred services in the community; Bilal ensures that young people’s views are fed back to Barnet’s Youth Participation Strategy Group.

Following the award of funding from Public Health England (an executive agency of the Department of Health), Bilal is also now working to deliver a project looking at self-harm, including the role of social media in it.

Former QE School Captain Roger Pearce (OE 1961-69), who enjoyed a police career which saw him rise to become head of the Met’s Special Branch, is now a successful political thriller writer.

Roger, who writes based on his first-hand experience, signed a two-book deal with Coronet, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, and the first book, Agent of the State, has now been published in hardback.

Roger, of Underne House, was at the School when Tim Edwards was Headmaster and John Pearce (no relation) his Housemaster. After graduating with a BA Honours in Theology from St John’s College, Durham University in 1972, Roger married Margaret, a former pupil at Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School, whom he had met when both were Sixth-Formers. Roger had intended to become ordained as an Anglican priest, but instead joined Durham Constabulary in 1973 and transferred to the Metropolitan Police in 1975.

Within a year Roger had applied to join Special Branch at New Scotland Yard. He also began an external LLB Honours degree from London University by private study and in 1979 qualified as a barrister-at-law at the Middle Temple.

Formed in 1883, the Branch’s mission was to gather secret intelligence against terrorists and extremists. It conducted sensitive assignments here and abroad and was also responsible for the protection of the Cabinet, of visiting heads of state and of VIPs. Roger became the head of Special Branch in 1999 and also served as the Met’s Director of Intelligence, authorising surveillance and undercover operations against serious and organised crime. He held both posts until 2003. The Met’s Special Branch was merged with the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13) to form Counter Terrorism Command, or SO15, in 2006.

In his last months of service, Roger was approached by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to take up the newly formed post of Counter-Terrorism Adviser, where he worked with government and intelligence experts worldwide in the campaign against Al Qaeda. In 2005 he was hired by GE Capital in London as managing director of European security.

Roger and Margaret have just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. They have two sons, both former QE pupils: Andrew, a composer, and Matthew, an airline pilot. Their daughter, Laura, is a personal assistant.

Roger had been writing for several years and was delighted when a top London literary agent agreed to represent him and eventually brought him together with the team from Hodder. The sequel to Agent of the State, entitled The Extremist, is to be published in July 2013.

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of QE’s pioneering expedition to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – reportedly the first-ever British school party to visit Russia.

The month-long trip in two Dormobiles covered 5,000 miles, with the party of three teachers, 12 Sixth-Formers and two former School Captains mostly camping along the way.

The expedition came at the height of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall was barely a year old and, coincidentally, was to claim its first victim during the QE trip, when an 18-year-old German bricklayer was shot and left to bleed to death while trying to escape to West Berlin. And just two months after the expedition returned, the world would be teetering on the brink of nuclear war as the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted.

Led by Kay Townsend and Richard Dilley – two masters at the School who had learnt Russian during their National Service – the preparation started a year before the expedition’s departure on 30th July 1962.

The party comprised these two, together with fellow teacher Eric Crofts, as well as former School Captains John Swann and Brian Salter and pupils John Paternoster, Pete Connor, Alan Bloch, Frank Edmonds, Andrew Tarry (known as ‘Ned’: a reference to a character in the Goons, a popular radio programme at the time), Torj Herbert, John Holloway, Pete Mitchell, Sam Smith, John Keeley, Hugh Sinclair and Willy Upsdale.

In parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia, camping was not possible so they were were accommodated in student hostels.

Their experiences ranged from eating takeaway caviar wrapped in newspaper to being stared at by women working on building sites in the Ukraine who muttered “Capitalisti” and spat on the ground. For much of the time, they were accompanied by two young women who had been assigned to them by the authorities to keep watch over them.

John Keeley and Andrew Tarry have produced a full account of the trip, which will appear in the Old Elizabethans’ Association’s forthcoming issue of its newsletter.

They write: “Many of us who left the School 50 years ago do have very happy memories of our time at QE. Our education in the broadest sense was certainly not exclusively focused on exams; many of our life skills were developed playing in sporting teams on Stapylton field, as well as travelling further afield during such challenging school trips as this one.”

Three Old Elizabethan medics are among a group of London healthcare students who have teamed up to sponsor a child’s education in Sri Lanka.

Raahul Niranchanan (2010–2017), Vipushan Konesalingam (2010-2016) and Athithyan Vijayathasan (2009-2016) are supporting a string of fundraising activities to raise £3,000 for Ocean Stars Trust – a UK charity working in Sri Lanka.

All three are studying at George’s University of London and are committee members of the St George’s Tamil Society.

“If there was one lesson we learnt from attending School at QE, it was the idea that everyone is capable of making a change,” says Raahul.

The team originally began as 17 people meeting in the living room of a house numbered 17A, hence the team name they adopted, 17A.

Their JustGiving page explains their motivation: “We appreciate that growing up in London…we often take what we have for granted. So, when uni got a bit tough for us and we started complaining, we took a step back: we realised we’ve actually got an opportunity to even get as far as studying a degree.

“But there are kids out there who don’t even know if they would still be in school tomorrow, or who can only dream of having an education.

“We know education is a gift that no one or nothing should take away from you, not even poverty.

“Our aim is to be able to give the opportunity we received so easily to another child. A child who dreams for a better education, a better future and a better life. We hope we can help make those dreams come true.”

The charity they have chosen works closely with orphans and other disadvantaged children in Sri Lanka.

The team got things off to a good start with a successful bake sale at St George’s University, London, which raised £500, followed by a Hot Wing Challenge – a spicy wing-eating contest in which OE courage featured prominently!

For more information, or to donate to Team 17A, go to their JustGiving, Instagram or Facebook page.

With next term’s examinations fast approaching, my colleagues and I have been further reflecting on questions of how young people study, of effective learning habits and of the best ways to revise.

A recent staff training day focused on how to improve information recall. Research has indicated that reading through notes and highlighting are poor revision strategies, popular as they are. As a general rule, the more active the strategy the better: in fact, even the simple act of reading aloud makes a significant difference to pupils’ ability to recall facts and ideas in an examination. Reading through notes infrequently followed by repeated testing is much better than infrequent tests interspersed by endlessly reading. Short but frequent periods of revision are more effective than one long ‘cramming’ session.

We encourage boys to make intelligent use of technology in their study, but that technology can be a double-edged sword. It has been shown that the apparent efficiency of multi-tasking is illusory, because this habit does not take account of the way the brain actually works. Separate tasks, such as studying while trying to listen to something else, are handled by different circuits in the brain, so if you pay more attention to one task for a moment, you are necessarily paying less attention to the other. Moreover, trying to learn new facts and ideas while multi-tasking can result in that information being sent to the wrong part of the brain, with the result that it is harder to retrieve later.

I know that, when not actually in lessons, many of our pupils, and perhaps some alumni, too, are always ‘plugged in’, smartphone, earbuds and social media at the ready. Some may even fear the prospect of boredom. While the urge to reflexively pick up your phone in moments of ‘downtime’ is understandable, in my view there is much to be said for embracing boredom. Spending time on your own with only your thoughts for company gives you the opportunity to play them out in your head, to explore those ‘new ideas and new solutions’ – concepts not yet sufficiently developed to be shared with others – that form part of free-thinking scholarship. Advances in neuroscience have confirmed physiologically that allowing the mind to wander can engender deep insights and strategic clarity, while also enhancing mental health. The development of such habits accords well with our mission’s aim of “promoting boys’ general wellbeing and their enjoyment of learning, rewarding effort and celebrating success”.

Periods of reflection (‘daydreaming’) can absolutely be productive. As I told guests at our Senior Awards Evening, where we welcomed as our guest of honour, Professor Michael Arthur, President and Provost of University College London: “Creativity cannot be scheduled, nor inventiveness timetabled.” Richard Feynman came up with his Nobel Prize-winning ideas about quantum electrodynamics by reflecting on a peculiar hobby of his — spinning a plate on his finger. And without a time of solitary reflection, we might never have had Harry Potter. J K Rowling traces the boy wizard’s genesis back to a railway journey from Manchester to London which she spent alone, without smartphone or even pen and paper.

At other times, creativity can be stimulated by articulating one’s thoughts and discussing them with others. Here, the time that boys spend in School is important, and QE offers them just the right sort of interlocutors – a combination of equally able and interested peers, together with staff who have deep knowledge, expertise and a well-developed interest in the subjects they teach.

In this age of always-on technology and Google, some question whether we need to memorise facts at all. A pragmatic answer is that effective recall of information has become more important for schools because of recent educational reforms and the return to linear assessments and final examinations. Our senior boys simply must develop the skills of retaining information. One way of achieving this is to train the brain through enjoyable but stretching extra-curricular activity: the learning of lines required for drama productions such as this term’s Lord of the Flies is a good example. But beyond the drive for examination success, there are deeper reasons for our insistence on the importance of knowledge acquisition. In order to think profoundly about ideas, it is first necessary to have certain content securely lodged within your brain.

Moreover, we are in the business here of nurturing and equipping young men who will in the future take up places as leaders in society nationally and internationally. And, simply put, to be a sophisticated adult of that ilk, there is ‘stuff’ you need to know. To this end, we have been turning our attention to the curriculum in the Lower School, asking ourselves if we have got the content right. Cognisant of the fact that boys will inevitably study some subjects for only three years, we are considering what cultural capital every student of Queen Elizabeth’s School should acquire as a minimum. For example, after nine terms of Music lessons, will all pupils be able to appreciate the different genres?

This term, I have enjoyed opportunities to greet old boys who have returned to the School to engage with our current pupils. Most recently, there was Hemang Hirani (OE 2008–2015), who came in to lead a discussion session with a select group of Year 12 geographers. Hemang, who is now a Private Banking Executive at Barclays, studied Geography and Economics at the LSE. His visit was a valuable example of an important aspect of the support we seek to offer pupils – helping stretch the older boys academically by giving them an insight into, and a taster of, university-level material and discussion.

Earlier, we had a return visit from Nick Millet (OE 2001–2008), who spoke to boys in the middle years about his work with refugees, reminding us that although the international migrant crisis in southern Europe may largely have disappeared from the headlines in recent months, an immense humanitarian challenge remains. Nick put his career as a management consultant on hold to co-found the charitable organisation Refugee Education Chios, which provides education, support and training for teenagers and young adults living on the Greek island of Chios, which became a de facto detention centre after the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement.

The ethic of service and of giving something back to society, which Nick’s work reflects, is seen in the endeavours of many younger alumni. Elsewhere in this newsletter you can ready about the fundraising project being undertaken by three OE students at St George’s University Medical School, namely Raahul Niranchanan, Vipushan Konesalingam and Athithyan Vijayathasan.

On the School website, we also reported recently on the efforts of Oxford undergraduates Conor Mellon and Rohan Radia (both OE 2010–2017), who raised £1,800 for a range of charities when they took part in the Oxford RAG’s annual jailbreak ‘run’ and, I understand, successfully reached Amsterdam.

Our young roboteers are currently preparing to go even further afield after being hugely successful in national competitions: I spent a happy lunchtime congratulating around 30 of them as they look forward to going to this year’s international VEX Robotics international finals in Kentucky, from where, of course, QE emerged with a world championship title last year.

It was good, too, to see so many members of the Elizabethan community, including alumni, turning out for the Rugby Sevens.

My best wishes to all Old Elizabethans,

Neil Enright,
Headmaster