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As Britain faces an uncertain economic future, a trip to central London gave QE Economists valuable insights into the role of the Bank of England and into the country’s changing relationship with Europe.

Open to all Year 11 pupils studying Economics, the trip took in a tour of the Bank of England Museum, discussion of the work of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), a ride on the London Eye and a visit to Europe House, the information office for the European Parliament.

The day started at the museum with a presentation on the role of money, interest rates and inflation in the UK economy. The boys found out about the vast vaults holding the UK’s and other countries’ gold reserves and also discovered how to identify genuine banknotes from counterfeits. Economics teacher Sonia Strnad said: “The most popular exhibit by far was the real gold bar: the boys were very surprised at its weight as well as its value.”

There were also direct curricular benefits arising from the day. At the Bank, the boys had the opportunity to discuss factors affecting the MPC when it sets the base rate, thus enhancing their understanding of monetary policy. “This was a valuable supplement to their knowledge and understanding of the Unit 12 topic, Managing the Economy,” Mrs Strnad said.

Next stop was the London Eye – the world’s tallest cantilevered observation wheel, as the boys learned. After examining the London skyline from their vantage point 135 metres above the River Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament, the group walked through Westminster to Europe House. There they attended a workshop and acted the part of European parliamentarians in a debate on the UK’s future relationship with the EU, whilst learning about the role of key European institutions.

“The boys took their role-playing as MEPs very seriously and their debate was not only well-informed but delivered with confidence and passion,” said Mrs Strnad. “In fact, they were exemplary throughout the day, displaying a keen interest in all the activities.”

Year 7 boys took part in a specially arranged workshop designed to keep pupils safe on the roads by highlighting the dangers of being distracted by music, mobile phones or friends.

A theatre group, The Riot Act, performed a play called Deadly Distraction. This was followed by an interactive session in which the pupils were encouraged to reflect on the key road safety messages they had heard.

Assistant Head Michael Taylor said: “We seek to promote safe, responsible and positive behaviour amongst pupils on their journeys to School and home again.

“It was a great performance, with important messages about road safety, which will help the boys keep themselves safe on dark winter evenings.”

The workshop was arranged in association with the Borough of Barnet.

Form tutors are following up the themes covered with the boys in their Personal Development Time (PDT) sessions.

Veteran Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins threw down the gauntlet to today’s QE pupils when he visited the School for the first time in more than half a century.

Politics had become “full of extreme egos – selfish, self–centred and in search of fame” and its “intellectual culture” had gone. “I’d like to see it restored… perhaps you will do that,” he told the audience at the Politics Society meeting.

Kelvin (OE 1952–1959) traced his inspiration for entering politics back to his School days, when he could see the front of the QE Main Building from the bedroom window of the family home near Ravenscroft Park. He remembered seeing poor boys come to School hungry; this, he said, meant he “naturally became a person of the left… and I retain that passion all these years later”.

During his visit to the Politics Society, which was arranged by Year 13 pupil Adrian Burbie and chaired by Rehaan Bapoo, of Year 12, he answered some wide-ranging questions from the floor in a good-natured and thoughtful manner. He was welcomed to the School – his first time on the premises since he came to play in a jazz band in 1960 – by Headmaster Neil Enright and Head of Politics Liam Hargadon, who is also Head of Year 13.

Kelvin had a long career within the trade union movement, including roles with the TUC and, latterly, Unison, and it was only in 1997 that he became an MP, taking Luton North with a 17.4% swing from the Conservatives – the sixth-largest swing to Labour in the country. And yet, although he entered Parliament as part of the landslide that swept Tony Blair to power, he is firmly on the left of his party and no fan of the former PM. There was much discussion during the meeting about the relative merits and faults of Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair.

Blair, he said, had not won the three General Elections in 1997, 2001 and 2005: instead, the Conservatives had lost them, with New Labour holding on only because “the Tories were still too unpopular”. He labelled Tony Blair the political son of Margaret Thatcher and argued that free trade and neo-liberalism had produced “lower growth, higher unemployment and greater instability”. The world had become a “worse place” since Blair’s decision to support President George W Bush in Iraq, he believed, warning that we should beware “charismatics” in politics.

A former supporter of Tony Benn and longstanding member of the Eurosceptic left, Kelvin was one of the MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership in 2015, and he continues to support the present Leader of the Opposition. People were “looking for someone different”, and this could be Jeremy Corbyn. But he acknowledged the difficulty of winning former Labour supporters back, describing the task of getting the party back into power as a “serious challenge”.

Having served (twice) on the Public Administration Committee, as well as on the European Scrutiny Committee and Transport Committee, he was briefly Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (July – October 2016), following the wave of resignations triggered by the removal of Hilary Benn as Shadow Foreign Secretary.

Kelvin campaigned for a ‘leave’ vote in June’s EU Referendum. He felt the fact that the Labour Party establishment campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU was a problem, given that 70% of Labour constituencies outside London voted ‘leave’.

Topics raised in questions asked from the floor included:

• Trident – he is against nuclear weapons, having been a leading member of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
• Free trade – he is more in favour of managed trade, based on Keynesian principles
• Voting age – he supports the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds.

For the first time, QE has this year entered two teams into a national engineering challenge.

In previous years, individual QE teams have performed very strongly in the Engineering Education Scheme, so, for 2016–2017, the School decided to double up.

For the scheme, which is run by the Engineering Development Trust, entrants are asked to develop a solution to a real-life problem relevant to a local company. The scheme includes use of a university’s engineering workshops to develop, build and test their solutions. It requires problem-solving skills and helps the participants learn to work as a team.

Competitors benefit from professional-level lectures on project-management and on communications (written, verbal and visual). Later in the scheme, the boys will be required to prepare a written technical report and then to present their solution to a panel of senior professional engineers.

As the initial six-month project phase got under way, the two QE Year 12 teams paid visits to their respective companies.

Team 1, comprising Mohit Miyanger, Piragash Selvakumar, Richard Cavanagh and Ricky Eatough, are working with Overbury, an office outfitting company which is a major player in its market. Their project aims to deal with issues of working at height, currently the most common source of injury at work in the office outfitting industry.

They visited several Overbury sites in Canary Wharf. Head of Technology Michael Noonan said: “Our first point of call was the Clifford Chance building, owned and leased out by one of the largest law firms in the world. Here we visited the new developing offices of Deutsche Bank, and met with our company representative, Alex Wood, as well as the site managers. The boys were given a formal introduction to the company, after which we were taken around the site. They interviewed many of the workers and supervisors, and began to see some of the issues which working at height present.”

Team 2, which consists of Souhardh Kotakadi , Rahul Kanwar, Visagan Manivannan and Aravindh Manivannan, are focusing on issues of waste management on building sites. Their teacher, Shane Ryan, said: “Our trip took us to construction firm Lovell's Lymington Fields site near Chadwell Heath, a large-scale housing estate under construction since 2011. Here we met with our Lovell’s representative, Sophia Bruce.” Like Team 1, Team 2 received a formal introduction to their company and were given a tour of the site; they, too, took the opportunity to interview workers and supervisors.

“From there, we travelled to Lovell’s flagship project in Woolwich Arsenal, a much busier building site, where the boys were shown a number of different waste management issues and the current ways the company is dealing with them,” said Mr Ryan. “We discussed our next steps with Sophia for designing and manufacturing the prototype, which we aim to complete at our visit to UCL in January.”

Year 9 boys all produced videos on a subject close to their heart – with the winning six being shown in assembly. The finalists tackled a very diverse range of topics, including animal cruelty, road safety and the attractions of Norway.

After congratulating the six, Head of Year 9 Ian Benjafield invited them on stage so they could introduce their videos before the films were viewed by their classmates.

Headmaster Neil Enright was impressed by the creativity of the shortlisted boys and by the level of research that had gone into their videos. He also commended the boys for their public-speaking skills in introducing the films.

Two films particularly stood out, said Mr Enright. These were:

• Anish Khetani’s exploration of the problem of food wastage, which included tips on avoiding waste, easy-to-grasp statistics, some impressive graphics featuring cartoon characters, and even some audience interaction.
• Karan Patel’s powerful video on the dangers of smoking, which used the story of a family, produced from cut-out figures. With high production values, this emotive film provoked the biggest audience reaction.

Both were “very original and very powerful”, said Mr Enright, before announcing Karan, from Underne House, as the winner, with Anish Khetani, of Harrisons, as runner-up.

The other finalists were:

• Hugh Wescott (Stapylton House), who looked at people’s awareness – or lack of it – of their surroundings and the resulting safety implications. This was inspired by the Pokémon Go craze, which saw players walk around with their eyes glued to their phones. Referring to the thousands of injuries suffered each year, Hugh gave a strong, practical message, with road-crossing safety advice. All his footage was self-shot and was edited together well. [Third place]
• Dominic Kumaresan (Pearce), who celebrated his enthusiasm for Norway, with lots of good information and such strong use of images that it seemed almost like a promotional film from the tourist board. [Fourth place]
• Amey Madkaikar (Broughton), who dealt with animal cruelty and the importance of treating animals well. He told how he helps wildlife at home by putting out bowls of rice for the birds. For contrast, this narration was interspersed with images of dishevelled and distressed animals. Amey’s film was produced using WeVideo, an online video editing platform. [Fifth place]
• Ayushman Mukherjee (Leicester), who gave an appreciation of the internet and all it can do, with a particular focus on how easy it is to find information. It featured a humorous ‘shutting down’ final sequence. [Sixth place]

QE boys went to a special interactive lecture show looking at the Mathematics behind The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the best-selling book and award-winning stage show.

Forty-three Year 11 pupils travelled to the event at the West End Gielgud Theatre, which is also currently hosting the stage play.
It was, said pupil Kishan Patel, “really fun and had lots of humour” – a sentiment echoed by his classmate, Nico Puthu, who found the show “very funny with a lot of interesting problems and concepts that you don’t see every day”, while Nishant Saxena said: “The show got us to think outside the box.”

Hosted by comedian and Mathematics communicator Matt Parker, the lecture show, entitled The Curious Coincidence of Maths in the Day-Time, was split into two main parts. The first half explored some of the intriguing and often beautiful mathematical ideas that are touched on in the book, while the second part examined aspects of Mathematics involved in the staging of the smash-hit West End production.

Rob Eastaway, writer of many popular Mathematics books, started by considering the book’s title. He asked what was curious about the dog’s behaviour. The fact that the dog did not bark turns out to be useful information. He went on to look at two other situations in which a lack of data is significant. Kiran Aberdeen took to the stage to see if he could guess the colour of the hat he was wearing – his fellow pupil, Sehj Khanna, found this the most enjoyable part of the show. Rob Eastaway then showed how the distribution of bullet holes on returning aircraft in the war was used to decide where reinforcement was needed.

In the book, the main protagonist, Christopher, must find his way to Fenchurch Street Station when he only knows the approximate direction he should travel in. His strategy led Hannah Fry, lecturer in the Mathematics of Cities at UCL, to look at algorithms for finding the way through a maze, with applications to satellite navigation. She considered how ants navigate their way to food and back to their nest.

A question about the population of frogs in a pond prompted freelance Mathematics speaker Ben Sparks to describe how an iteration formula that is easy to state for populations may turn out to have very complicated, chaotic outcomes. Rob and Hannah looked at two situations in probability that are counterintuitive. In Hannah’s example, she considered how unlikely events are likely to be seen given sufficient observations, whilst Rob looked at a variation of the famous Monty Hall Problem (a probability puzzle).

The second half of the lecture show started with a performance of a scene from the play in which the main character described how he had answered an A-level question involving Pythagoras’ Theorem. Matt Parker then showed a 1:25 scale model of the stage (including furniture) made by the set designer. Since the set is a laid out as a coordinate grid it was possible to position model furniture in the model and then show the real thing on the stage, he explained. In a recorded interview with the set designer, the audience learned that the accurate model is used to check all aspects of the staging and construction. Set design uses a surprising amount of mathematics.

Ben Sparks, who is a musician as well as a mathematician, spoke with the composer, Adrian Sutton, who wrote the score for the play. In the book, the chapters are numbered with the prime numbers; Adrian therefore used prime numbers to shape the music.

The show closed with Rob, Hannah and Ben each sharing a snippet of interesting Mathematics. They looked at: sine waves and sound; Penrose tiling (a pattern of tiling named after the mathematician and physicist, Roger Penrose) and exponential growth.

Afterwards, pupil Bashmy Basheer reflected on the show: “I found the set of talks both informative and fun; it really showed me the beauty of Maths.”