A QE team has taken first prize in a local competition designed to test pupils’ knowledge of literature.
The five-strong team, all from Year 7, successfully fought off competition from eight other schools to win the 2017 Barnet Kids Lit Quiz. It was QE’s first-ever entry in the Barnet quiz, although the School has won the regional North West London heat of the international Kids Lit Quiz competition for the past two years.
The Barnet quiz involved six rounds of questions, including author anagrams, picture clues and trivia about literary award-winners. The QE boys finished five points ahead of the next-placed school, Mill Hill County.
They won book tokens as well as a cup, which the School has the right to retain until the competition is run next year.
QE Librarian Ciara Murray said: “I’m consistently impressed by the boys’ breadth of knowledge – the questions were really quite tough! Their success bodes well for the regional competition in September.”
The team comprised: Abdur-Rahman Ismail, Heemy Kalam, Leo Dane-Liebesny and Vedaangh Rungta and Divyam Shah. Leo was also in the combined Year 7 and 8 team that won the regional competition heat in November 2016.
Ms Murray added that, between them, the Barnet competition team have borrowed more than 300 books from The Queen’s Library so far this year, with Divyam single-handedly accounting for 112 of these.
The boys trained with English teacher Alex Ulyet and Year 10 pupil librarian Kieran Dhrona on Wednesday lunchtimes, testing their knowledge of a range of books and competing against the Year 8 boys who took part in the regional and national finals of the Kids Lit Quiz last year.
In addition to QE and Mill Hill County, the competing schools were The Totteridge Academy, The Compton, St James’ Catholic High, Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’, Copthall, JCoSS and East Barn et.