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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.

Two Year 11 boys were invited to the Parliamentary launch of a major report on digital communications – after their new political blog rapidly attracted thousands of followers.

Adrian Burbie and Ché Applewhaite established Whippersnapper in January to give themselves and other like-minded young people a platform to voice their views and to promote lively discussion around the hot topics of the UK and world today. With lively, fresh posts every couple of days, the new blog quickly found a readership and in its first two weeks attracted more than 1,500 followers.

It also caught the eye of the Digital Democracy Commission, who invited them to attend the launch of its report, Open Up!, at Portcullis House, the Westminster office block that provides offices for 213 MPs. The report was the culmination of a year’s project which investigated how Parliament can use digital technology to help it to be more transparent, inclusive, and better able to engage the public with democracy.

Adrian and Ché joined some august company at the breakfast launch hosted by the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow MP (pictured right). The Commission itself included Robert Halfon MP, Hull University Politics Professor, Cristina Leston-Bandeira, and Helen Milner, Chief Executive of the Tinder Foundation, a leading not-for-profit social enterprise committed to the ‘smart’ use of digital technology. The invited audience included journalists, MPs and professionals with interest in the field.

“We were delighted to be invited, as we have an interest in both politics and digital media,” said Adrian. “We chose the name ‘Whippersnapper’ as we know that some older people often view younger people as being feckless layabouts, who are apathetic about politics and contribute little to society. We hope we can be the exception that disproves the rule.”

“We are the generation who have grown up with digital media as a core part of how we acquire and share knowledge,” said Ché. “It’s rewarding that our views and opinions are seen as valuable by the Establishment; indeed the invitation to the launch reflects that.”

During the Q&A session at the end of the report’s launch, Adrian put a question to the Commission.

“I asked them whether there was a danger that public access to legislation would lead to policy-makers being swayed by populism and therefore conducting themselves in a way to merely boost their online popularity.”

The question was answered by Commission member, Robert Halfon, who likened the current situation to when television was introduced in the House of Commons. He had faith in the British public to vote for the government they believed would do the best job; populism might occasionally triumph in the short term, but in the long term people make the right decisions.

A visit to the British Library’s special exhibition on the gothic imagination provided Year 12 boys with a macabre selection of the eerie, the supernatural and the murderous.

But the display, entitled Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, served a good cause as the boys are studying Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, Frankenstein, for this summer’s English examination.

“There was a plethora of detail for the boys to experience,” said English teacher Sarah Snowdon. “Henry Fuseli's eerie paintings were displayed with the Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’ popular during the murderous era of Jack the Ripper. It was interesting to read how one chilling publication, known as Spring-heeled Jack, is believed to have inspired the creation of Batman.”

The exhibition covered 250 years of gothic influences, beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, a novel which challenged the moral certainties of the 18^th Century. There were also displays on the work of film-maker Stanley Kubrick and fashion designer Alexander McQueen, demonstrating how imagination is at the heart of the gothic genre in film, art and fashion, as well as literature.

One particularly popular exhibit explored enjoyable modern-day parodies such as Wallace and Gromit’s The Curse of the Were-rabbit.

“It was easy to see why the exhibition's popularity led the library to stay open for extra viewings; it was extremely informative and well researched,” added Ms Snowdon. “With hand-written drafts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula on show alongside material from Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, the 34 boys who went on the visit could appreciate how the writers they study in class continue to cast a shadowy influence over the modern horror genre.”

In the best-ever result by QE, all four boys who took part in this year’s British Physics Olympiad were awarded gold medals in Round 1 and one qualified for the second round.

Robert Swan, of Year 13, was placed in the top 50 and therefore went through to Round 2 of the olympiad (BPhO). Like Robert, Vinul Wimalaweera, Alex Zanre and Tianlin Zhang, who are also in the Upper Sixth, were awarded gold – an accolade given to just 200 of the 1600-plus entrants that the national competition attracts.

“I was very impressed,” said Physics teacher Ashley Dyson. “Our previous best as a School was two golds in one year, so this is a significant achievement and reflects the boys’ hard work and enthusiasm.”

The BPhO was set up to encourage the study of Physics and to recognise excellence in young physicists through annual competitions. It aims to challenge able students with stimulating questions, allow them to have fun problem-solving, and to practise open-ended and unstructured questions as seen at higher levels of study.

Robert has already sat the paper for Round 2 and is awaiting the results. The top five in the country will have the opportunity represent Britain at the International Physics Olympiad, which this year will take place in Mumbai, India.

One of the world’s leading human geographers set out four keys to success at QE’s Senior Awards ceremony.

Professor Sir Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Warwick, was Guest of Honour for the evening, during which around 140 prizes were awarded to pupils from Year 10 to Year 13.

In his speech, he expatiated on four important qualities. Perseverance is necessary, since not everything will fall into one’s lap immediately. Intellectual curiosity should be nurtured; as a boy, Professor Thrift would study maps and by the time he was 16 he had travelled widely on his own. A passion for what you do is essential; for those who have it, much else will simply fall into place. Finally, boys should seek to give something back to society – a theme anticipated by Headmaster Neil Enright in his introduction, when he highlighted the importance attached by QE to voluntary work.

Born in Bath and educated at Aberystwyth and Bristol, Professor Thrift has followed a career that has involved senior roles at Bristol and Oxford universities before his appointment to his current position at Warwick in 2006. He has won several prestigious academic awards, including the Royal Geographical Society Victoria Medal for contributions to geographic research and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 2007.

Professor Thrift told the award-winners in the audience that he had lived in locations including Australia, the USA, Belgium, Sweden, Austria and Singapore – and he expected that many of them would have careers that would likewise lead them all over the world.

His interest in coming to QE had been piqued by a number of factors. There was not only the School’s truly first-class academic reputation and the fact that the Headmaster was, like him, a geographer; he had also been drawn by the number of Elizabethans going to Warwick – 65 in the past four years, which is more than have gone to any other university except Cambridge.

The evening was punctuated by a number of musical interludes from pupils: pianists Yuta Tsuchiya and Jason Wong performed Frank Bridge’s Canzonetta and Franz Liszt’s La Campanella, while Kavi Pau sang Sure on this Shining Night by Samuel Barber.

Professor Thrift then talked about the pre-eminence of his university. Of the 330 institutions of higher education in the UK, Warwick is both among the 24 member universities making up the Russell Group and in the top ten for graduates’ employability. It has students from more than 150 countries and is a world-class research institution; its students have conducted research in most corners of the globe. Professor Thrift also mentioned that Warwick has the highest number of student societies – 250!

After the ceremony, everyone present repaired to the Shearly Hall, where the prize-winners and their families enjoyed chatting with teachers and with Professor Thrift. Volunteers from the Friends of Queen Elizabeth’s were on hand to assist with the buffet.