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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.”

New Government league tables of examination results confirm Queen Elizabeth’s School’s position in the top rank of all schools across both the state and independent sectors.

QE was the country’s top boys’ school for GCSE results, headed in the rankings only by The Henrietta Barnett School, a girls’ school, and by Focus School, a small, co-educational, independent, Christian school in Coventry. At all three schools, 100% of pupils achieved the Government benchmark of five A*-C grades including English and Mathematics.

For A-level results, QE was the country’s second-ranked state school, behind Heathfield Community School in Taunton, Somerset, and just ahead of Henrietta Barnett. The A-level results were ranked by average point score per examination entry.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “It is good to have confirmation in these league tables of the excellence of last summer’s results, when a remarkable 98.8% of A-levels taken here were awarded grades A*-B.”

At Key Stage 4, QE also performed strongly in the Government’s new performance measure, Progress 8, which shows the progress made by pupils in eight key subjects since primary school. Its score of 0.70 was the highest of all five top-ranked schools for GCSE results.

“I am pleased to see our School faring so well in Progress 8: as a selective school, we naturally have a very bright intake of boys, but this new performance measure confirms that our staff are effectively challenging and stretching them to make the most of their potential,” added Mr Enright.

“It is also interesting to note that all of the top three state schools for GCSE results – QE, Henrietta Barnett and St Michael’s Catholic Grammar School – are in the borough of Barnet.”

Leading politicians of every hue took to the stage at a conference for A-level Politics students – and showed each other nothing but respect.

QE’s Year 12 A-level Politics student who had travelled to the event in Westminster Central Hall heard discussion of a wide variety of issues.

Year 12 pupil Rehaan Bapoo, Chairman of QE’s Politics Society, said: “In a world of increasingly hostile politics, it was refreshing to see that in the UK politicians can still be civil with each other, despite their differing beliefs.”

The day featured 15-minute speeches from various senior political figures, such as House of Commons Speaker John Bercow, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sir Alan Duncan, Leading Labour backbencher Chuka Umunna, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg and Douglas Carswell, the sole UKIP MP.

One constant theme was the speakers urging that young people should engage with politics and vote regularly once they come of age. Chuka Umunna explained that he had attended the same conference 20 years before and it had stimulated his interest in Politics by giving him an opportunity to get his questions answered. He said he hoped this year’s event would do the same for the sixth-formers there.

Rehaan reported that the boys were engrossed with the speeches, which ranged in topic from the future of the Conservative Party and the position of Britain in a post-Brexit world to diversity in Politics.

The opportunity given for members of the audience to ask the speakers questions after they had concluded their speeches resulted in “many riveting debates stoked by intriguing questions”. And Rehaan contributed with a question of his own to Sir Alan Duncan: “Were [Leader of the French Front National, Marine] Le Pen to be elected and remove France from the EU, would this be the beginning of an increasingly isolationist Europe?”

QE’s Head of Politics, Liam Hargadon, said “Our Politics students have attended this conference every year and are invariably surprised and challenged by the speakers. It’s a unique opportunity to speak directly to national leaders.”

A Model United Nations Conference was a challenge in more ways than one for the seven QE pupils involved – but they rose to it magnificently.

The boys represented Rwanda and Qatar in debates on topics that brought together practical politics and moral dilemmas.

The topics on the agenda for the event held at Benenden, the Kent girls’ boarding school, were the:

• Militarisation of space
• Protection of rights of the LGBTQ+ community
• Issue of capacity-building in failing states
• Integration and assimilation of migrants into new environments.

Physics teacher and Extra-Curricular Enrichment Tutor Georgina Garfield, who attended with the boys, said: “The conference was excellent, with some fascinating debates. You’d think that Rwanda wouldn’t have a vast amount to say about whether or not we should have weapons in space, for example, but that team – and, indeed, both teams – researched everything so thoroughly that they were able to participate and represent their countries really well.”

And Year 12 pupil Nikhil Shah said: “It was an amazing experience to participate in an event where I could take on the role of a delegate of Qatar, even though it was challenging to voice opinions which are at odds with my own.”

After the debates in the individual committees, all the delegations met in the hall for the General Assembly, where a resolution that had been passed in SPECPOL (Special Political Committee) was debated in more detail. The resolution was in relation to capacity-building and essentially said that education should be a key priority in trying to improve failing states. Year 13 pupil Shayen Sathiananthan took the floor, speaking in favour of the resolution for Qatar; he took ‘points of information’ from delegates of other countries. “The rest of our delegates were also keen and confident, and challenged the views put forward by other delegations,” said Miss Garfield.

In addition to Nikhil and Shayen, the QE representatives were: Tej Mehta, of Year 11 (representing Rwanda); Mipham Samten, of Year 11 (Rwanda); Zayn Riaz, of Year 12, (Rwanda); Dhruv Kanabar, of Year 12, (Qatar), and Atul John, of Year 12 (Qatar).

Zayn said: “The conference was an insightful experience and helped me understand the importance of cohesion between member states in the UN.”

The boys are now working to prepare for a mini-conference to be hosted by QE soon. They will also be representing Mexico, Germany, Senegal and India at a Model United Nations conference at The John Warner School in Hoddesdon in February.

Senior boys learned about the importance of developing their personal brand from an internationally respected leadership expert.

Roger Delves, Dean of Qualifications and Professor of Leadership Practice at Ashridge Executive Education, Berkhamsted, gave a lecture during a Senior School assembly.

After being introduced by Year 13 Sanchit Agrawal, Mr Delves urged boys to start thinking about and developing their personal branding early in their careers. Since all QE pupils are bright, intelligence is not what will set them apart at School, nor later at work. Those who do not have a strong brand leave themselves open to others stereotyping or caricaturing them, he warned.

Going to university is a “watershed moment,” he said; it represents an opportunity to re-do your personal branding, to drop certain behaviours, to pick up new ones and even to escape the nickname that has dogged you.

But he cautioned that a brand has to be credible – “You have to be able to live up to it.” Its essence lies in one’s personal values and it was thus important that boys should not hide what they believed in, since people can respond emotionally to that. In fact, while brands need both rational and emotional appeal, it is the latter which is more important, since it makes the greater impression.

Mr Delves, who is the father of a boy in the Lower School, currently leads the Personal Impact module on both the Ashridge and Hult Executive MBA programmes. (The two business schools merged operationally in 2015.) Voted MBA Professor of the Year by both MBA and EMBA students of Hult’s London campus in 2012, he has taught for Hult in London, New York, San Francisco and Shanghai. He previously worked as a UK Board Director for international advertising agency DMB&B. His special interests are understanding the roles of authenticity, emotional intelligence, ethics and integrity in leadership and in decision-making.

He explained to the Year 11-13 boys gathered in the Shearly Hall the difference between management and leadership. Management involves coping with complexity to produce the “narrowest possible gap between what the organisation should be doing and what it is actually doing”, and improving the culture that exists. Leadership concerns coping with change and bringing about change or setting the future direction, as well as creating new cultures and inspiring people to follow you.

Both leaders and managers need a personal brand, but it will be different, and “as a leader you would need to think about what would make others want to follow you”, he said.

In a question-and-answer session, Mr Delves was asked about using social media as part of personal branding. He urged great caution, since a mistake could cause enormous damage. Questioned on university interviews, he advised boys to be themselves, but in a way that respected their surroundings: they should dress reasonably smartly and always show mutual respect, while still demonstrating their personal brand in their answers, making sure the interviewers heard about their qualities and the things they had achieved. And when asked what differentiates a good leader from a great one, he said that anyone could be a good leader, but that to be great you had to have something in you that makes you love to lead: “it has to be in your blood”.

QE’s pupil librarians had the opportunity to gather inspiration from a leading girls’ school’s library when they paid a visit to hear a talk by a successful author.

Fifteen boys headed off to North London Collegiate School, where they were given a tour of the independent school’s McLauchlan Library after hearing from Young Adults (YA) author Keren David. They joined pupils from several other schools, including Hemel Hempstead, John Lyon, Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls, Sacred Heart and Copthall.

Keren spoke about how she became an author and combines it with a career in journalism. She also related her experience of turning her novel, Lia’s Guide to Winning the Lottery, into a script for a musical.

She always writes in the first person and, therefore, before starting a new book, she must find the voice of a person whose story she wishes to tell. In her latest work, Cuckoo, the protagonist is a young, homeless actor who ‘sofa-surfed’ with friends to avoid sleeping on the streets – a form of hidden homelessness that is relatively common among young people because of family breakdown, as she pointed out to her audience at NLCS.

After the talk, the boys were free to explore the library, which dates from 1999. With study space for around 100 pupils, the NLCS library is similar in capacity to The Queen’s Library at QE, which opened in 2014.  There are, however, some obvious differences: “Our boys were particularly taken with the vertical design of the McLauchlan Library, which is housed over four floors with a central spiral staircase,” said QE librarian Ciara Murray. Year 10 pupil Saifullah Shah wanted to see another floor devoted to books at QE: “The Library needs to colonise even more of our School!”

The non-fiction collection at NLCS is long-established and Saifullah said he would like to see the breadth of QE’s non-fiction collection increased. However, Ms Murray said that after the visit, the QE pupil librarians reflected that The Queen’s Library’s fiction collection is a particular strength.

Saifullah also wishes to have more author talks at QE. Another Year 10 pupil, Alex Beard, was inspired by the languages collection at NLCS – Ms Murray pledged that QE’s own collection will be growing to match. Year 8 boy Arjun Patel collected some of the Year 7 recommended reading lists from the McLauchlan Library to help him with his current project, which revolves around making recommendations to people once they have finished one book and want something similar to read. He has devised visually attractive ‘recommended read’ cards to be inserted into the back covers of books.

Overall, although the boys had enjoyed their trip to the McLauchlan Library and were intrigued by the multi-floor design, they preferred the fact that in The Queen’s Library, it is not necessary to walk up and down stairs to get to different subject areas, Ms Murray added.