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The Holocaust Memorial Service, in which QE boy Drew Sellis appeared as part of a choir, is now available to watch on the BBC iPlayer.

The service in Central Hall, Westminster, which marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, was a national event, which was attended by Prince Charles, Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Leader Ed Miliband.

Drew, of Year 8, is part of the Finchley Children’s Music Group, which was invited to perform an extract from composer Carl Davis’s Last Train to Tomorrow. The service was recorded and broadcast on BBC2. It is available to watch on the iPlayer until 25th February.

Omar Salim, Mehmet Ergisi and Jake Breindel, all from Year 12, attended the Borough of Barnet’s Holocaust Memorial Day. Hundreds attended the event, which took place in the Rickett Quadrangle at Middlesex University’s campus in Hendon. This year’s theme was Keep the Memory Alive. As well as marking the Auschwitz anniversary, the ceremony also remembered the genocide at Srebrenica in Bosnia, which took place 20 years ago.

The Mayor of Barnet, Councillor Hugh Rayner, said: “This year’s theme reaffirms the importance of remembering past events if we are to ensure these horrors are never to be repeated.”

BBC iPlayer link

QE has been named runner-up in a London-wide schools competition involving the creation of a Mathematics video.

A Year 11 team comprising Aadil Kara, Akshay Narayan and Janith Peiris took the MegaMaths Award in the competition run jointly by King’s College London and Exeter University.

The Kings-Exeter Mathematics Competition drew more than 30 entries from school teams across the capital. They were required to make a Platonic or Archimedean solid and explain the mathematics behind it in a short film.

The successful QE team made a five-minute video featuring speeded-up footage and voices. Their chosen solid was a shape with 62 faces, 120 vertices and 180 edges – otherwise known as a truncated icosidodecahedron. Their video earned the following official plaudit when it was posted on the competition website: “So much maths, so fast – this mathematical tour de force from Aadil, Akshay and Janith will keep you on your toes.”

They named their team 1.21 Gigawatts – a reference to the electricity needed to power the time machine in the Back to the Future film trilogy.

The videos were appraised according to three criteria:

• How good was the object made?
• Was the mathematics discussed a) interesting and b) presented clearly?
• Was the video well-produced and engaging.

The video can be viewed on the King’s College website:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/mathsschool/Competition/2014-Winners.aspx

Congratulating the trio, Head of Mathematics Jessica Steer said they will attend the competition’s awards ceremony on 10^th March. She also thanked all the other teams who had entered.

The overall winner of the competition was Henrietta Barnett School.

An atmospheric and engaging performance by a leading children’s theatre company has helped Year 9 develop their understanding of Macbeth – one of their set texts for this year.

QE Head of English Susannah Sweetman said seeing the live performance by the Globe Players had further enhanced the appeal to the boys of one of Shakespeare's darkest works.

A perennial favourite, Macbeth is a powerful exploration of themes of ambition, corruption, fate and free will, kingship and tyranny which still resonate to this day. Set in Scotland, the play dramatises the corrosive psychological and political effects produced when evil is chosen as a way to fulfil the ambition for power.

“Part of its enduring popularity, particularly amongst school children, are the well-known theatre superstitions surrounding the play,” said Ms Sweetman. “The legend that the show is cursed and that it is even unlucky to mention the play’s name during a production definitely appeals to that age group.

“The performance was theatrically captivating and brought life to the themes Year 9 have been studying this term. There were sinister moments, when the eerie voices of the prophetic witches could be heard offstage, building tension in the audience by creating a darkly dramatic impact. An experience such as this is ideal at this stage as part of the boys’ preparation for GCSE," Ms Sweetman added.

The Globe Players have been bringing affordable, professional live theatre, to school children for more than 50 years across London and the South East.

Bollywood Fusion, this year’s main Friends of Queen Elizabeth's (FQE) social event, proved a great success, providing a winning combination of dazzling colour, great food and plenty of fun.

The Shearly Hall, which was packed with guests, conjured up an authentic Bollywood atmosphere, complete with coloured lighting, swathes of material and old film posters.

Guests enjoyed a three-course Indian meal, starting with canapés including vegetable samosas, papdi chaat, chilli paneer, lamb kebab and fish tikka. The main courses were kofta curry, mixed vegetable, daal makhni and chicken curry with naan bread, rice, salad, yoghurt and chutney side dishes. The dessert was gulab jaman (mini doughnuts in syrup) with gajar halwa, a sweet topping made of grated carrot cooked with milk and sugar.

Jay Kumar, a Bollywood dancer and choreographer provided the entertainment. He enjoys a strong reputation not just for the high-quality dance performances he stages with his troupe, DanceAsia, but also for his interactive sets, during which the audience is encouraged to join in. He specialises in teaching simple Bollywood and bhangra dance routines which the audience can pick up within a few minutes.

“It was a very enjoyable evening,” said Headmaster Neil Enright. “We very much appreciate all the fund-raising activities undertaken by FQE, and to see nearly everyone on their feet joining in bhangra-style dancing certainly made for a lively night.”

Many prizes were on offer in the raffle, including signed posters of the biggest Bollywood star in the world, Shah Rukh Khan. School staff also joined in with great enthusiasm, dressing up in outfits borrowed from a number of mums and committee members who organised the event. The FQE Organising Committee for the event was headed by Mrs. Hetal Shah and ably assisted by Mrs. Rupa Parmar, Mrs. Mala Shah, Mrs. Parul Patel, Dr. Bharti Shah, Mrs. Priti Sethi and Mrs. Nimi Patel.

A QE Sixth-Former is waiting to hear if he is to represent Britain at the International Mathematics Olympiad after achieving a perfect score in the prestigious domestic competition.

Bhavik Mehta’s 60 out of 60 in the first round of the British Mathematics Olympiad (BMO) gained him a place at an overseas training camp for the candidates for the British team, as well as a book prize – Introduction to Inequalities by Christopher Bradley – and a gold medal.

He had won his place in the BMO earlier in the year when he achieved QE’s highest score – 106 out of a possible 125 marks – in the UK Senior Mathematics Challenge.

Bhavik, of Year 13, has now also sat the BMO second round paper and will soon know whether he has achieved a high enough score to become part of the British team for the IMO, which will take place this July in Chiang-Mai in Thailand.

He was invited to the training camp in Hungary during the Christmas holidays. He stayed in Dombóvár Gunaras, a small town in the south west of the country, along with 21 UK school students. They took part in an intensive daily schedule which involved a two-and-a-half hour test every morning and a Mathematics lecture in the afternoon, followed by a group problem-solving session. In the evening they went through the test they had sat that morning.

“Bhavik has done exceptionally well, particularly in achieving a perfect score,” said Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung, who co-ordinates QE’s competition entries. “We wish him every success in the next round in his quest to join the élite group who go on to represent Britain at the IMO.”

He is one of only a handful of QE boys ever to have qualified for the second round of the BMO, the most recent being Old Elizabethan Gabriel Gendler who was placed equal 15th when he was still in Year 11. Gabriel is currently in his first year at Trinity College, Cambridge – where Bhavik himself has been offered a place to read Mathematics.

Round 1 of the BMO consisted of six long questions to be completed in three-and-a-half hours.  Round 2 involved four long questions, again to be completed in three-and-a-half hours.

In the Senior Kangaroo, a competition for those who do well in the UK Senior Mathematics Challenge but narrowly miss out on the points needed to qualify for the BMO, Tianlin Zhang, of Year 13, was awarded a Merit certificate for his score of 80 out of 100, while Ravin Parekh, also of Year 13, and Daniel Cheung, of Year 12, were both awarded Participation certificates.

Language was brought to life for Year 9 boys when a specialist theatre company performed a play entirely in German at the School.

The play, Meine neue Schwester [My new sister], is set in Hamburg in Germany and tells the story of two girls, Katarina and Sonja, whose parents are about to marry each other. It follows the ups and downs of their relationship and how they adjust to life together. The play is a comedy; the two girls meet for the first time and do not get on, until they find a common interest – boys!

The play lasted 50 minutes. The School received a vocabulary list and a brief extract of the play beforehand to facilitate pupils' understanding of the performance.

“Our boys thoroughly enjoyed the experience,” said Head of Languages Christopher Kidd. “They were able to join the cast on stage and interact with the actors. The boys’ responses in German to the questioning were most impressive and they handled themselves very well.”

The visiting theatre company, Onatti Ltd, specialise in performing plays to schools in the UK in French, German and Spanish, as well as English plays to schools in France. It is their second visit to QE; they performed a play in French to Year 8 in December.