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QE boys have taken part in a once-in-their-lifetime experience – the shooting of a School photo.

A photograph of the whole School is taken once every seven years on the field in front of Main Building, giving all boys who complete their schooling at QE a chance to appear.

All pupils on the roll, from Year 7 to 13, are included, amounting to just under 1,200 boys. In addition, the photo includes the Chairman of Governors, Barrie Martin MBE, and nearly 150 staff, including the Headmaster, all teachers, support staff, the site team and the catering staff.

It took a whole morning to set up the equipment, while the operation to dismantle it extended into the afternoon.

The earliest known photo showing the whole School dates back to 1919 and was taken within a few months of the end of the First World War.

Parents will soon have the opportunity to purchase copies of the new photo.

The mother of a former School Captain returned to QE to give Year 13 boys a rarely considered perspective on young people going to university – that of the parent.

Drawing on her own experience with her son, Matthew (OE 2002-2009), Mrs Rita Rose gave a talk in assembly to the Sixth-Formers who will be leaving the School in just a few months.

She spoke to the boys about preparing to leave home, including the need for financial preparation and mastering some basic household tasks. She looked at the experience of settling in at university, explaining that while everyone is ‘in the same boat’, people cope with all the change in different ways. There was guidance on undergraduates’ wellbeing, including practical advice such as the importance of signing up with a local doctor.

And Mrs Rose, who is a primary-school teacher, made a plea for her audience to remember that going to university involved “new worries” not just for the students but also for their parents. Communication with home was therefore important and “not just when you need money,” she said.

Modern technology meant there were opportunities aplenty to stay in touch, including email, text messages, Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp, not to mention telephone calls. “At the very least, occasionally let them know you are still alive!” she concluded.

Her own son took up a place at Clare College, Cambridge, to read Geography. Matthew is now a political advisor at Barnet Council.

Two Sixth-Formers have qualified for the final of the British Biology Olympiad – the first time ever that more than one QE boy has scored highly enough to reach this stage of the competition.

However, only Andrew Hui will actually participate in the BBO final at Warwick because fellow Year 13 pupil Robert Swan has also qualified for the final of the British Physics Olympiad, which is taking place on the same date.

Andrew, Robert, Kieran Chan and Khilan Shah all received gold awards for their first-round performance and were invited to take part in the second round, placing them in the top 129 students, or 2.1% of the field, nationally.

Head of Biology Gillian Ridge said: “This was a very strong performance by these four boys and I wish Andrew every success in the final. Robert’s double achievement is quite remarkable – and I know he is hoping to complete a ‘grand slam’ by reaching a third final when he takes part in the Chemistry Olympiad.”

Robert and Andrew’s scores in the second round’s even more demanding paper put them into the top 20 élite who were then invited to participate in the final at Warwick. A team of four will be selected to form the UK team for the International Biology Olympiad in Denmark.

At Warwick, Andrew and the other finalists will spend one day in an undergraduate laboratory being trained in techniques beyond those required for A-level. On the second day, his practical skills will be tested by members of the School of Life Sciences.

The annual competition is organised by the Society of Biology whose Chair, Dr Andrew Treharne, said: “I very much look forward to meeting the 20 finalists; well done to these students. The Society of Biology and the UKBC volunteers who run the competitions were very impressed with the high standard of the entries this year."

Altogether 24 boys from QE entered the competition, which this year attracted a record entry nationwide, with nearly 6,200 students from around 300 schools taking part. Of the QE cohort, 21 boys achieved gold, silver or bronze – awards given to the top third of participants. The other three were either Highly Commended or Commended.

“All the boys who took part are to be congratulated,” said Dr Ridge. “Their achievements reflect the very high standard at which our boys study.”

A team of QE Sixth-Formers has come second in a prestigious national Economics competition, the best-ever performance by the School.

Target 2.0 is an annual competition run by the Bank of England and The Times newspaper in which participants are challenged to judge the course of the economy and the outlook for inflation in order to keep it on target, just as the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) aims to do.

“We were delighted with the boys’ achievement,” said Liane Ryan, QE’s Head of Economics. “The organisers said it was a very close-run thing and we were only narrowly pushed into second place.” The winners were independent school, The Perse, from Cambridge.

The QE team comprised Aum Thacker, Joseph Levene, Shanil Modi and Nischal Udani, who carried out the presentation. They were each supported by a researcher: these were Bilal Hussain, Joseph Fiber, Daniel Soyode and Shahvir Magol. Sharmilan Ilankesan set up and analysed a business survey and produced the PowerPoint presentation, which was praised by both bank staff and judges.

Each round of the competition required the team to tell the judges what monetary policy they thought would offer the best chance of meeting the Government’s inflation target of 2%, and why.  The team analysed costs & prices, the labour market, demand & output and financial markets, both domestic and international. The QE team chose to keep rates at the current record low of 0.5%, to leave the current £375bn level of asset purchases unchanged and not to provide any new forward guidance for future monetary policy.

In the regional heat, the team had 15 minutes to present their decisions; in the South-East area final they had 17 minutes, but for the national final they had 20 minutes. Additional time is allocated as the teams progress, as there is a requirement to explain changes from previous decisions. Each team then had to answer questions posed by the judges for a further 15 minutes, based on both their arguments and wider economic understanding.

“The competition is a fantastic experience and encourages students to develop their macroeconomic knowledge and understanding beyond the A-Level specification,” said Ms Ryan.  “It is an opportunity for them to engage with complex policy decisions and experience presenting to members of the MPC and leading economists and journalists. I am extremely proud of the team and their achievement.”

The boys won a £1,000 prize for the School.

Guides at the famous Bletchley Park World War II code-breaking centre were so impressed by a group of young cryptographers from QE that they adapted their lecture to make it more challenging.

Thirteen members of the School’s thriving Cryptography Club from Years 7–9 went on a day trip to the heritage site at Milton Keynes.

As well as the original Bletchley Park mansion, original wartime code-breaking huts and blocks are preserved at the site. The boys went on a tour of the grounds, during which they saw two German cipher machines – the Enigma and the less well-known, but more complicated, Lorenz.

In addition, the QE group visited a short exhibition on the 2014 film, Imitation Game, an historical thriller loosely based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. Turing was the brilliant computer scientist who led the wartime code-breaking at Bletchley Park.

“They relished the opportunity to see the very places where Turing and his team successfully cracked coded messages, giving the Allies a crucial advantage against the Nazis,” reports club organiser and Mathematics teacher, Fiona Wynn.

“The boys enjoyed dressing up in World War II costumes and posing in a classroom of the era,” said Miss Wynn. “Later they attended a talk about the Enigma machine and different types of codes and ciphers, and they were given the chance to encrypt and decrypt a message into a real Enigma machine.”

The Cryptography Club meets at lunchtimes. Boys learn the history of cryptography and discover how to solve different types of codes, often drawing on complex Mathematics.

A team of four boys from Years 8 and 9 came second in the regional final of a national Mathematics competition, competing against other leading schools.

Nico Puthu, Ben Suen, Edward Hu and Drew Sellis joined 34 teams from schools including Merchant Taylors’ School, Watford Grammar School for Girls and eventual winners St Albans School at The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School for the regional final of the UK Mathematics Trust Team Maths Challenge. The QE boys scored 219 out of a possible 236.

The regional round was an all-day event which incorporated a number of rounds, each representing a different challenge. For the group round, teams had to solve ten questions of varying type and difficulty within a set time. Each team had to decide its own strategy; whether to work in pairs, individually or as a whole team.

Team captain Nico said they enjoyed the whole experience. “It was a really fun day. We especially enjoyed the relay round, where we split into pairs and had to take turns to solve the problems.” This round involved a great deal of movement as the participants raced against the clock to complete the challenge.

The annual competition is open to pupils in Key Stage 3, with a maximum contingent of two from Year 9. It attracts hundreds of entries from across the UK, with the regional winners and a few high-achieving runners-up invited to take part in the national final held in the Royal Horticultural Halls in London.

With the regional rounds due to be completed by the end of April, the QE team is now waiting to see if they will be amongst the invited finalists.