Mukund Soni (starting Year 12) took first prize in the national Young Financial Journalist Competition with his impressive analysis of the decline of cash.
His carefully researched essay beat hundreds of other entries to take the top place in the 14-15 age group, drawing fulsome plaudits from the judges.
Mukund won £150 for himself as well as ten free places for QE pupils on the London Institute of Banking & Finance’s Lessons in Financial Education programme. The competition was run by the LIBF in collaboration with the Financial Times.
In his appraisal, FT columnist and TV mathematics expert Bobby Seagull wrote: “Excellent article! With a clear, nuanced view about how society might transition to cashless and a judicious use of data to back up key points! Sometimes, younger writers try to convince readers through an over reliance on stats, but this didn’t do that.”
His fellow judge, Claer Barrett, an award-winning journalist who has been the Editor of FT Money since 2015 and Consumer Editor at the FT, was equally impressed: “A fantastically well-researched piece on the decline of cash, which drew on international examples – and some from ancient history – to hammer the main points home.
“Highlighting the increased costs that small businesses face from using card payment and contactless machines instead of cash was particularly insightful. As well as what happens with digital payments if your phone runs out of battery!”
An abridged version of Mukund’s 830-word essay was published in the FT and he appeared in a LIBF podcast with his Economics teacher, Gus Ornelas.
Mukund, who this month was awarded a level 9 grade in his Economics GCSE, as well as eight other grade 9s and one grade 8, explained how he had benefited from taking part in the competition: “It was interesting to look at the topic in more detail, and I gained a much greater understanding of the benefits of a cashless society. I also think some of my other skills – like researching, finding good sources, referencing them and writing an extended piece – they increased quite a lot!”
Congratulating him, Dr Ornelas said: “This was a skilfully executed piece of writing in which Mukund not only investigated the reasons for the decreasing use of cash, but also highlighted the considerable problems that a cashless society presents.”
Building on QE’s strong international reputation in robotics established over the past five years, four senior and five junior teams qualified for the global VEX finals, which are usually held in the US but this year were run online because of the pandemic. Teams also took the opportunity to compete in offline, in-person events locally, including one hosted by QE.
At a VEX IQ Showcase held at QE, Gearsquad not only won the Teamwork award – jointly with GCA Gearers, a team from Greig City Academy in Haringey – but also took the Excellence award, as a result of which they have already qualified for next year’s world championships.
The pairing of Dhruv Syam and Ashwin Sridhar (now Year 12) – Team Salutem Validus – reached the final of the Amazon Longitude Prize Explorer competition with DevSalutem, their AI-powered wellbeing assistant with a companion app.
For Year 10, the brief was to work in groups to design and construct ‘wearable architecture’, using 6mm paper tubes.
Adjudicators at the Young Enterprise Trade Fair at Old Spitalfields Market praised the InDex Young Enterprise company for their creative approach and for the salesmanship they showed there.
“Our team impressed the judges massively,” said Mr Czirok-Carman. “They were extremely active – and very successful – in finding sales, and the judges therefore commented both on the creativity of the product and on their excellent sales techniques.
Guests at the public evening ‘town hall’ event, including Old Elizabethans and others with an interest in local history, were given a virtual guided tour and shown how to get the best out of the extensive high-quality online assets spanning more than four centuries.
“I am very excited that we are now able to share QE Collections with a wider audience.”
“We are constantly putting new material online, so the highlights would be different if I did this event in a few months’ time, or even next month,” Mr Bowyer added.
QE Collections uses professional digitisers to ensure its digitised files are of very high quality and has employed an industry-standard digital preservation system to ensure long-term availability for these digitised files, Mr Bowyer said, adding that while digital files are excellent for improving access, they are harder to preserve than physical objects, as digital storage media can become obsolete and data can become corrupted.
The School’s youngest pupils would normally be at the very heart of Founder’s Day, with all joining the morning service at Chipping Barnet Parish Church and then taking part in other formal elements – such as the Roll Call and the Reading of the School Chronicle – before enjoying the fun of the afternoon fete.
“Those who held steadfast in difficult times, as we’ve all had to do over the past year, and those who made bold decisions in the long-term interests of our Elizabethan community.”
Introducing Mr Rose, Mr Harrison told the boys that he was reprising his role as the youngest-ever Founder’s Day guest speaker in 2011.
Headmaster Neil Enright then fulfilled another time-honoured Founder’s Day practice: the reading of the School Chronicle. This charts QE’s history, starting in 1568, when one of the School’s early promoters, Edward Underne, became rector of Chipping Barnet.
Each Year 7 form put forward a team made up of three or four boys. First place went to Pearce, with team members Ameen Elamin, Kyle Goldband, Tuhin Mitra and Nittant Moudgil scoring an emphatic victory.
“They were allowed to use their text books to help, as the ‘vocab’ we used was taken from the Year 7 course, but the sentences were pitched to be extra-challenging, particularly in terms of grammatical structures.”