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Year 10’s Aaryan Prabhaker has won the 2026 World Math Hackathon – a global competition where contestants focus on using mathematics to solve some of the planet’s most pressing issues.

QE is announcing his success today on National Numeracy Day 2026.*

Aaryan won the gold medal and first prize, beating a young Canadian mathematician into second place, reversing the order last year, when he was runner-up to Canadian pupil Havish Bhavasar.

He secured first place with his essay on the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on poverty reduction. Pupils from Canada took both second and third places this year.

Head of Mathematics Jessica Steer said: “Our congratulations go to Aaryan, who showed perseverance, creativity, and, of course, great mathematical ability to produce an outstanding essay.”

Open to pupils aged 11-17 worldwide, the World Math Hackathon is run by Explorer Hop, a Toronto-based educational organisation that focuses on financial literacy, money management, and entrepreneurship.

The competition tackles a different SDG every year and is aligned with the United Nations Sustainability Plan.

Previous examples of the challenges set include: the problem of vaccine deliveries in underprivileged countries; creating sustainable living communities by designing a walkable city, and finding solutions for sustainability and inequality.

Aaryan rose to the challenge by producing an essay on how education and training could help reduce poverty in Ethiopia – the case study provided by the competition organisers.

He applied mathematical modelling to evaluate three spending options to provide basic education, but also suggested other, low-cost measures, including the use of social media and community story-telling sessions.

His essay concluded with these words: “A holistic and well-rounded approach can help solve the crisis that Ethiopia faces today and help provide education to millions of children. Education is like the water, sun and soil, all combined together that can help nurture and grow these children out of poverty.”

* National Numeracy Day is a UK campaign dedicated to improving everyday maths. Each May, individuals, schools and organisations across the country come together to help children and adults feel more confident with numbers at work, at home and at school. This year’s theme is Count on Your Community.

• You can read Aaryan’s essay here.

Sixth-former Hisham Khan was named in the top 25% of the 100 élite young mathematicians competing in the final round of the British Mathematical Olympiad – considered the UK’s hardest national Maths competition.

Hisham and fellow Year 13 pupil Joshua Wilkinson reached the BMO’s second round after both won bronze medals in round 1, where they were ranked among the top 100 of the 1,300 who took part.

Assistant Head of Mathematics Kirtan Shah said: “Due to the sheer volume of students who enter, it is not easy to be a top scorer in round 1 and progress to the final round. But Hisham and Joshua did even better than that, mustering clear focus, endurance and resilience in round 2.

“Overall, theirs was a fantastic performance that will serve as an inspiration to others.”

The BMO is a UK-wide competition for Year 10 to 13 run by the UK Maths Trust (UKMT). Even to enter, students have to rank in the top 1,000 of the separate UK Senior Mathematical Challenge (UKSMC), or be entered by their Maths teacher.

The first round of the BMO lasts three-and-a-half hours and has six questions.

Both Hisham and Joshua qualified for it by coming in the UKSMC top 1,000.

Like round 1, round 2 lasts three-and-a-half hours, but it has four, not six, questions.

Hisham is no stranger to success in the BMO: in the previous academic year, he secured a silver medal in round 1, while 2025 leaver Saim Khan won bronze, missing out on a silver by just one mark.

In addition to their bronze medals, Hisham and Joshua, both from Year 13, won a book, Introduction to Number Theory, by C J Bradley, who was a lecturer at Oxford.

Hisham also won a certificate of distinction for coming in the top 25% in round 2.

Head of Year 13 Akhil Gohil presented Hisham and Joshua with their medals and books in Year 13 assembly.

Four sixth-formers reached the national final of a prestigious competition with their detailed plan for building on the UK’s strengths and resolving its economic woes.

The Year 12 Economics students were among only eight teams from a 173-strong field to make it to the final of the Institute of Economic Affairs and Vinson Centre Budget Challenge.

They had first swept through the initial round to win a place in the semi-final, where they emerged successfully from a face-to-face grilling on their proposals.

Head of Economics Krishna Shah said: “These four students not only demonstrated a strong grasp of current economic conditions, but also set out a credible strategy and some detailed proposals for dealing with the UK’s economic issues. Our congratulations go to all four of them on reaching the final in this well-respected competition.”

Economics is a popular A-level choice at QE. In 2025, 21 candidates secured places to read Economics at university, while ten of the 44 offers of places from Oxbridge this year were for Economics, either on its own, or as part of a wider degree, such as Oxford’s Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) course.

The IEA Budget Challenge aims to help young people: learn more about Economics; sharpen their writing, research and analytical skills; and better understand policy issues facing national decision-makers. There is a top prize of £1,000.

For the first round of the challenge, Peter Atanasov, Shreyas lyengar, Aditya Karmarkar and Ahsan Rahman had to submit a 5,000-word entry giving:

• Their analysis of UK macroeconomic conditions and prospects for the next two years
• An outline of what they considered to be the main economic goals and their broad strategy for pursuing them
• A proposed budget, setting out taxes and other sources of revenue, expected levels of spending by department, and details of expected borrowing (if any).

Their entry secured them one of 12 team places in the semi-final held at the University of Buckingham. Here, they were tasked with creating a presentation on their proposed budget.

They had ten minutes to present their revenue-raising policies, which included a move to asset-based taxation. There were also Government spending measures, such as competition policies and supply-side policies which included spending on education and vocational training.

The four were then subjected to a rapid ten minutes of questions-and-answers from their distinguished panellists Dr Steve Davies, Senior Education Fellow at the IEA (an educational charity and free-market think tank) and Professor Juan Castaneda, Director of the Vinson Centre – a research and knowledge exchange base at Buckingham.

In the final at the IEA’s headquarters in Westminster, the team delivered a presentation on the evaluation of their budget, on alternative methods they could use in the future, and on some constraints they had not considered before.

Afterwards, all four pupils reflected positively on their experience. Ahsan said: “Taking part in competitions like this gives you greater insight into how UK budgets work.” Peter benefitted from “…thinking about and understanding the changing economic landscape towards sustainability”.

Aditya enjoyed developing his teamwork and collaboration skills. And, after facing two rounds of Q&As, Shreyas said: “It certainly helps you develop the way in which you respond to rapid-fire questions under pressure and thinking on the spot!”

While candidates in Barnet and other London boroughs today celebrate their election as councillors or lick their wounds after losing their seats, QE pupil Avi Aggarwal is savouring his own electoral victory.

Year 10’s Avi has been elected to Barnet’s Youth Assembly. It is understood he garnered some 1,800 votes from across the borough’s schools.

Avi will be serving as a Youth Ambassador, seeking to advance financial education in the curriculum in schools across Barnet and beyond.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I offer my congratulations to Avi and commend him for the initiative he has shown. We wish him every success in his role.

“Ever since Queen Elizabeth I granted our founding charter in 1573 for ‘the establishment of the Free Grammar School of Queen Elizabeth in Barnet’, we have maintained strong local roots at QE: it is therefore great to see pupils taking part in local democracy. It’s also very much in line with being ‘community-orientated’ – one of the six priorities of our Boundless School plan.”

Delivering financial education is a statutory obligation in UK secondary schools. In England, it covers topics such as budgeting, credit & debt, insurance, savings, and pensions. At QE, aspects of personal finance are taught in Maths lessons and, through the Personal Development Time Curriculum, in tutor groups.

Nationally, there is growing recognition across the education system of the need for more innovative and collaborative approaches to ensure pupils gain the financial literacy skills they need for the future.

In a curriculum review that is currently under way, the Government is placing a strong emphasis on strengthening financial literacy in schools as part of its overall aim of giving young people the skills for life and work. The new curriculum is due to be implemented for first teaching from September 2028.

Avi said: “Financial education is something people are always talking about, but which still has a long way to go to give all young people vital skills they need to succeed professionally and financially later in their lives.”

He secured one of two Youth Ambassador seats, fighting off a challenge from four other candidates. He plans to use his new position to lobby for change.

“To help out with the journey, for the last few months I have been campaigning to become Youth Ambassador so that I can create lasting change at both a grassroots level throughout my own borough’s schools and also throughout the rest of the UK through the upcoming 2028 curriculum refresh.”

He will now work to deliver on his campaign’s promises through his two-year term of office.

Barnet Youth Assembly is this year celebrating its tenth year of operation, having been originally established in 2015, before stopping and then re-starting in 2023.

Avi’s friend and fellow Year 10 pupil, Siddharth Kumar, also stood in the election, narrowly missing out on a seat. Siddharth’s manifesto policy was on Improving Transport in Barnet, looking at how roadwork repair could be more efficient, and introducing more cycling and walking pathways, as part of urban greening.

Queen Elizabeth’s enters the record books this term as the first school ever to have two teams in the 30-team national final of the English Schools Chess Championship.

The seeds of this remarkable double success were sown back in the Autumn Term, when Team A took first place in the regional qualifier at St Albans School, with Team B the runners-up.

They then won their coveted places at June’s University of Nottingham final with a string of victories over some familiar but tough rivals in the zonal stages.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “It’s been an exhilarating year for our chess players, who deserve great praise for playing so well in the regional and zonal rounds, and for putting QE firmly in the spotlight with their double qualification for the national final. What a fantastic achievement! We wish them all well in Nottingham.”

In the zonal stages, QE’s B team went first. After seeing off North London Collegiate School convincingly by 11.5 points to 0.5, they progressed to an away semi-final against Harrow. It was a tougher and tenser challenge, which came down to the last of the six games. This was duly won, giving QE a 4-2 victory.

Merchant Taylors’ had beaten Haberdashers’ in the other semi-final, thus deciding Team B’s opponents in the zonal final. Crucial early points were secured on boards 5 and 6, and although the rest of their points came much later, the B team secured their place in the national final, beating Merchant Taylors’ by a three-point margin, winning 4.5–1.5.

As for the A team, they did things in style, winning all 24 of their individual zonal games! After first wiping out Bishop Douglass School 12-0 and Dame Alice Owen’s 6-0, they took on Haberdashers’ Boys’ the week after the B team’s zonal final triumph. They duly trounced Habs 6-0 in their own zonal final to claim their place at Nottingham among the other zonal final winners.

Teacher in charge of chess Geoff Roberts hailed the boys’ history-making feat. He added: “While the old format may possibly have seen schools with teams in both the main and plate national final competitions, no school has ever had two teams qualify since the English Chess Federation moved to the straightforward 30-team format a decade or so ago,” he said.

The QE teams comprise boys from Year 7 all the way through to Year 13.

Team A
Advait Keerthi Kumar, Year 8
Aayush Dewangan, Year 10
Rohan Katkar, Year 11
Rithwik Gururaj, Year 12
Nishchal Thatte, Year 12
Daiwik Solanki, Year 13

Team B
Gautam Sriram, Year 7
Hubert Bates, Year 8
Djad Ben-Eshak, Year 8
Kian Aggarwal, Year 10
Bharath Jayakumar, Year 10
Akshaj Khandelwal, Year 10
Shlok Parakh, Year 10
Ashwin Ravithas, Year 10

Two visiting artists helped QE pupils take a fresh look at familiar spaces through a project that embraced a variety of materials and techniques and got them out and about in the School grounds.

This story has been published to coincide with World Art Day – celebrated annually on 15th April. #WorldArtDay

The Year 8 project, entitled Traces, Places & Possible Futures — A Multispecies City, asked pupils to consider who and what lives alongside them, including plants, insects and other animals, and microbes.

Professional artists Abigail Hunt and Sum-Sum (Ngan-Sum) Tse-Cappi led three workshops, before the project culminated in a public exhibition of the boys’ work – and of pupils from Barnet’s Northway School and Chalgrove Primary School – at the Apthorp Gallery in North Finchley’s ArtsDepot.

Head of Art Craig Wheatley said: “This was an interactive and imaginative series of workshops, which celebrated students’ creativity and collaborative learning, while the exhibition amplified young people’s voices in conversations about future environments.”

Organised by the Art Department in collaboration with ArtsDepot, the project involved photography, construction and the use of clay and plaster during the workshops. The boys were encouraged to explore the spaces they live, learn and play in – and then reimagine them through sculpture, mapping, and collaborative making.

Through creative exploration the boys were encouraged to reflect on responsibility, care and respect for other species, and to imagine future environments that support coexistence. As well as living creatures, the project considered weather systems.

Across the linked workshops, pupils engaged with a process of observation, interpretation and construction, working with drawing, photography, casting and collage.

In Workshop 1, pupils explored their immediate environment through a multispecies lens. By exploring the area around the School, pupils were encouraged to record traces made by fauna and flora. They documented their findings through drawings, photographs, rubbings and clay moulds, which are developed into plaster tiles. Discussions introduce multispecies mapping, highlighting human routes alongside animal paths, insect highways and plant borders.

Workshop 2 focused on interpretation and design. Pupils collaborated on large-scale maps of the School and outdoor spaces, identifying how both humans and non-humans use these areas. They imagined themselves as other species, asking what those beings might need to thrive. Photographs from the first workshop were transformed into collage habitats, and pupils exchanged ‘creature postcards’ with the other participating schools, sharing design ideas.

In Workshop 3, pupils started to create ideas for building sculptural ecosystems and prototype habitats using found materials. Through these imaginative structures, they explored shelter, movement and connection for different species. Conversations around sustainability, impermanence and life cycles encouraged the boys to think critically about different environments, and to create environments to support real multispecies life. Pupils documented their work through photography and recorded stories, contributing to the final exhibition.

• Click on the thumbnails below to view the images.