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Four Year 12 boys have reached the regional final of a highly regarded national investment competition.

QE’s team, named the Naked Economists and comprising Ralph Flint, Paul Jung, Nathaniel Liu and Anthony Zhang, were competing against more than 30,000 students from across the UK in the ifs Student Investor Challenge. They made more than £40,000 trading in virtual shares in just three months of activity – out-performing the FTSE 100 share index in the process.

The team will now compete at the South East England regional final in London in March. If successful at that stage, they will have the opportunity of progressing to the national final in April, where the prize is an all expenses paid educational trip to New York and £2,000 for the School.

The competition, run by ifs University College and supported by Bloomberg, provides teams with £100,000 of virtual money to buy and sell shares in FTSE 100 companies. It gives teams of four students aged 14 to 19 years old the opportunity to experience the world of share-dealing and investing in the stock market. Now in its 20th year, the competition is the largest of its kind in the UK and is also open to international students.

“The competition gives our boys an ideal opportunity to gain experience of making investment decisions,” said QE’s Head of Economics, Liane Ryan. “It is only the third time that a team from QE has progressed to this stage of the competition; the boys are to be congratulated in overcoming such strong competition thus far.”

Alison Pask, Vice Principal at ifs University College said: “The competition also introduces competitors to core concepts such as risk, reward and diversification. This is a real achievement and many congratulations go to the team from Queen Elizabeth’s School.”

ifs University College describes itself as the “university for financial education”. It has a remit to provide the financial services industry with a skilled, effective and competent workforce whilst also promoting a better understanding of finance amongst consumers and young people.

Prince Charles has presented Queen Elizabeth's School's Chairman of Governors Barrie Martin with his MBE at an investiture at Buckingham Palace.

The MBE for services to education was announced in the 2014 New Year’s Honours List.

Just after returning from the ceremony, Mr Martin received a VIP invitation from Schools Minister Lord Nash to a special celebration for school governors at the House of Lords in April.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I would like to extend my congratulations once again to Barrie Martin on his MBE. It is an award that is very richly deserved: he has been an inestimable asset to the School over many years and a source of support and wise counsel to three headmasters, including me. I was delighted to hear that he and his family had a splendid day together at the Palace and trust that he will also enjoy his forthcoming visit to the House of Lords.”

Mr Martin was characteristically modest after the investiture. His elder son, Piers Martin, said his father wished to thank the School because he feels the School has done a great deal for him.

Mr Martin, who has been Chairman of both the Governing Body and of the Friends of Queen Elizabeth’s (FQE) since 1999, spent the morning at Buckingham Palace with his wife, Perin, with Piers (OE 1987-1994) and with his younger son, Giles (OE 1992-1999).

Having driven into town, they were able to park in the Palace’s inner courtyards. During the medal presentation ceremony itself, Prince Charles spent quite a considerable period talking to each of the recipients, including Mr Martin, having clearly taken time to apprise himself of his details.

Mr Martin, who will be 80 in April, worked full-time in his own chartered surveyor’s practice, Martin Russell Jones, in Edgware until last spring. Having sold the firm, which looks after accommodation including almshouses and social housing for the visually handicapped, he now works there as a consultant.

He has risen from humble beginnings. His father was a part-time jobbing builder who also worked as a policeman during World War II, a bus driver and a chauffeur, while his mother was a countrywoman from Dorset who remembered meeting Thomas Hardy in her youth.

Mr Martin had to spend a great deal of time in hospital between the ages of 10 and 14, which had a detrimental effect on his education. Leaving school at 16, he went to work in an estate agent’s and chartered surveyor’s office and began studying at night school. His perseverance earned its reward when he qualified as a chartered surveyor in 1958 at the age of 24.

As his sons grew up, he supported their schools, firstly becoming a governor at St Paul’s C of E Primary in Mill Hill, where he continues to serve both as a governor and PTA committee member, and then at QE in 1987 when Piers became a pupil.

In his letter of invitation to Mr Martin, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools Lord Nash wrote: “Raising the profile of governors and school governance is one of my top priorities…By celebrating your achievement I hope we will also be able to send a wider signal to governors across the country that the Government recognises and values them.”

The House of Lords celebration for those who have received a national award recently for their work as school governors takes place on Wednesday 2^nd April.

The whole of Year 10 – 180 boys – engaged with the lighter side of Mathematics when award-winning mathematician and comedian Matt Parker gave a special presentation.

The event, looking at the application of Mathematics, was organised by Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung.

“We invite Matt in to encourage the boys to see that there’s more to Maths than just completing exercises from a textbook,” she said. “His lectures help boys recognise that Maths is all around us and useful in many, many ways. As part of this lecture, he explained how all digital displays are spreadsheets: for example, watching TV is looking at a spreadsheet and listening to coordinates!”

This year’s talk was based on The Number Matrix. “There are numbers all around us that make our modern lives possible,” said Mr Parker. “From rescuing your lost words in text messages to protecting your Facebook profile, we rely on numbers to transmit and protect information – not just numbers, but text, pictures and sound – every day. In this highly engaging session, your eyes will be opened to the ubiquitous sea of numbers we all live in.”

Matt is based in the Mathematics department at Queen Mary, University of London, and is a previous winner of the People’s Choice Award at the national FameLab competition. He is a regular speaker for both the Royal Institution and the BBC. He is a highly enthusiastic mathematician who says his life goal is to make people more excited about Mathematics. His favourite number is currently 496!

A musical evening celebrating non-musical events made an unusual first concert of the year at QE.

Entitled The Seven Ages of Man and based on Jaques’ speech of that name in As You Like It, the concert marked the School’s own participation in the 2014 celebrations of the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

To a very full house in the Shearly Hall, Niam Radia, of Year 13, opened the concert by performing the speech, which famously begins with ‘All the world’s a stage’. The concert featured the School’s Symphony Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture, which tells Shakespeare’s ultimate story of impossible love, Romeo and Juliet. The music was also interspersed with a series of dramatic interludes – all passages from the Bard.

The musical items reflected the seven ages, beginning with infancy and a child on the changing table in Peter Warlock’s Pieds en l’Air, as well as Mozart’s and Brahms’ lullabies.

Director of Music Kieron Howe’s programme notes set out how the music then moved through the ages: “For the younger schoolboy we have cartoons in the Pink Panther Theme and a medley of fantastic melodies from the Disney studios. We look a little older for the lovely piece from The Sound of Music, Sixteen Going on Seventeen. We have a view of the stage of man as lover with the Junior Concert Band’s performance of Adam Duritz’s song Accidentally in Love from Shrek 2. The soldier is referenced in Gustav Holst’s Mars from The Planets Suite again performed by the Junior Concert Band.”

In the second half of the concert, old age was reflected in Benjamin Britten’s canonic arrangement of Old Abram Brown. The Tchaikovsky overture finished with the dramatic chords from the full orchestra becoming a final single long note depicting the death of the two lovers.

The concert involved a wide range of ensembles, including the Junior and Senior String Orchestras, the Junior Indian Music Ensemble, the Junior Concert Band and the trebles and altos of the Choir.

It ended with three movements from Requiem, the mass for the dead, which was the piece Mozart was writing at the time of his own death in 1791. Fittingly, this final performance featured the full spread of ages at QE, from Year 7 boys through to this year’s Upper Sixth and the staff choir.

The dramatic interludes ranged from well known soliloquys, such ‘To be or not to be’ from Hamlet, performed by Surya Bowyer, of Year 13,  to excerpts from Titus Andronicus, declaimed by Konstantin Nikolov, of Year 11,  and from Henry VI Part II, performed by Alex Wingrave, also of Year 11.

A QE team has achieved the School’s best-ever performance in the national final of the prestigious UK Maths Trust’s Senior Team Maths Challenge.

Captain Bhavik Mehta, Akash Amalean, Vaheshan Ramaneswaran and Tianlin Zhang, all from Year 12, were the first-ever team from QE to qualify for the national final, which was held at the Camden Centre in King’s Cross. They reached the last round after seeing off 18 other schools to win their regional final, held in November at Merchant Taylors’ School in Northwood.

In the national final, QE was placed 11th from a field of 59 schools. The team scored 167 points out of 182, only ten points behind the winners, Hampton School, who were accompanied by their Mathematics teacher, Old Elizabethan Daniel Griller, a 2008 leaver.

More than 4,000 pupils from 1,100 schools across the UK took part in the competition, which aims to promote mathematical dexterity, team-working, and communication skills.

A Year 11 pupil was named the best speaker at the regional final of a national public-speaking competition. Miles Huglin was awarded a shield for his speech arguing against the view that 'the truth has no inherent value' in the Hertfordshire final of the English-Speaking Union's Public Speaking Competition.

The tournament is open to teams of three pupils in Key Stage 4 (Years 10 and 11). “Miles and his team-mates, Akshat Joshi and Pranesh Varadarajan, also from Year 11, competed against seven other schools,” said History teacher Charlotte Coleman, who oversaw QE’s entry. “The team performed very well, but the standard was exceptionally high, with each of the competing schools having previously won a first-round competition, and unfortunately they did not progress to the next round.”

The Public Speaking Competition for Schools was started in 1960 and has evolved to become a highly respected national competition. Each team member takes one of three roles – chairperson, speaker or questioner.

Students who participate in the competition develop their knowledge of topical issues, while enhancing their speech-writing skills, their speaking and presentation skills, and their ability to think analytically on their feet. One of the aims of the competition is to help to develop confidence in the participants.