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Queen Elizabeth’s School pupils have secured 49 offers from Oxford and Cambridge this year – a figure only surpassed by last year’s all-time record.

This year’s tally, comprising 34 offers from Cambridge and 15 from Oxford, takes the total number of Oxbridge places offered to QE pupils over the past three years to 157.

2025 is also shaping up to be another strong year for QE applicants more generally: other universities have not yet completed the process of making offers, but already 94% of Year 13 already hold at least one offer, many of them from world-leading universities on prestigious courses, from Medicine to Modern Languages.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I extend my sincere congratulations to all our successful Oxbridge applicants. This stellar success is due reward not only for their dedication to their A-level studies and to wider interests, but also for their careful preparation for the university admissions tests and interviews.

“I thank my colleagues in the QE Futures programme for providing deeply informed and meticulous support and advice to the boys both before and during the admissions process. I am also grateful to the many alumni and other friends of the School who conducted mock interviews for these and other university applicants in the autumn.”

This year’s offers have come from 25 colleges, with the single highest number – five – from Gonville & Caius at Cambridge. They are for a considerable breadth of courses, from Oxford’s famous Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) degree to Architecture and Materials Science.

Ten boys have offers to read Medicine at Oxford and Cambridge, and nine to study Mathematics. The five boys securing offers for Computer Science constitute a new QE record.

Boys have also gained apprenticeships with blue-chip firms such as Goldman Sachs and Deloitte.

Assistant Head (Pupil Destinations) James Kane said: “While we congratulate these Oxford and Cambridge applicants, they will be very aware that it’s not over yet: they will need to continue working hard to achieve their required grades! But they are an excellent group and we have great confidence that not only will they take up their places, but will then enrich their respective colleges in the years to come.

“More broadly, we are delighted with the successes across the Year 13 cohort. Although many universities have not yet completed their offer processes – including LSE, all American universities and several universities offering Medicine – 38 UK universities have awarded offers to QE students so far. These include all four universities in the top 10 of the QS global rankings, namely Imperial College London, Oxford, Cambridge, UCL.

“A special mention goes to musician Harrison Lee, who has received offers to study Composition at both the Royal Northern College of Music and Trinity College of Music, as well as an offer for the joint course between the Royal Northern College of Music and Manchester University. Receiving offers from specialist Music conservatoires is an absolutely tremendous achievement – these are very competitive and specialised courses.

“As ever, we are mindful that some excellent Oxford and Cambridge applicants will be disappointed, but looking to the other offers being received by the year group it is clear that there are many different routes that will be similarly exciting and rewarding.”

A record 90 old boys and other friends of the School this year conducted more than 150 individual university mock interviews for pupils as part of the QE Futures programme.

This tally does not include the many mock interviews held by QE teachers, both for their own students and for pupils at three other schools, nor does it include a range of other interview support measures for aspiring medics, Oxbridge candidates and others in Year 13.

The programme aims to build on last year’s record of university success, with 54 boys securing places at Oxford or Cambridge and with 55% of all QE leavers receiving offers from a university ranked in the QS World Top 5.

Assistant Head (Pupil Destinations) James Kane, who leads the QE Futures programme, said: “We seek to provide detailed preparation for all our students applying to university, maximising their chances of obtaining offers on the most sought-after courses at some of the world’s top educational institutions.

“Last year, a record 90% of QE applicants were called to interview at Oxford and Cambridge. Many exciting course offers have already been made this year, with a very strong number of Oxford offers. We await further news and will then support students with confirming their preferences. We are most grateful to all those OEs and other friends of the School who support the process so generously. ”

As an introduction to the interview season, in November Gwyneth Hamand, the London Outreach Officer for Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, delivered an in-School workshop for 50 of QE’s Oxford and Cambridge applicants, giving them insight into what to expect from the interview process.

That was followed by a visit from Old Elizabethan doctors and entrepreneurs Kavi Samra and Paul Jung (both 2008–2015). The pair held interviews in School over three days for all 33 medical applicants as part of the QE Futures Pathways to Medicine programme.

Separately, Mr Kane and Head of Biology Gillian Ridge together led a session with 20 aspiring medics, taking them through mock Multiple Mini Interviews. (MMIs are used by medical schools to test a wide range of skills and assess potential candidates.)

More generally, Year 13 students have been undertaking mock university practice in lessons, and developing their confidence and articulacy during a series of inter-class debates.

Among those who have benefitted are two pupils applying to read Mathematics at Cambridge. Shreyaas Sandeep said: “I found the mock interviews to be extremely helpful, as they provided a unique insight into the process and helped me understand which areas of the subject I should focus on.”

Classmate Saim Khan added: “The mock interview was an excellent opportunity to get firsthand experience in the university admissions process from someone who had been through the exact same steps only two years prior. The OE who interviewed me was very knowledgeable, more than willing to help, and extremely thorough!”

QE staff liaise with teachers at The Henrietta Barnett School and Highgate School to provide the respective schools’ pupils with mock interview practice. In addition, QE teachers give their time to provide online mock interviews for students from Ashmole Academy in Barnet.

• The next major event in the QE Futures calendar is the School’s Careers Convention on Wednesday 12th February. Like the mock interviews, the convention is always heavily supported by Old Elizabethans, who provide current pupils with the benefit of their individual experience and with sector-specific careers advice.

Attendance at the 2024 Old Elizabethans Annual Reunion Dinner matched the record figure achieved amid 2023’s 450^th anniversary celebrations, with some 120 guests heading to Queen’s Road this year.

There was a particularly strong turnout from the Class of 2014, although other alumni ranged from those who were at QE in the 1950s right through to leavers from 2021, with every decade represented.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This year’s dinner was very enjoyable and pleasantly lively, with a lovely atmosphere, and we have had very positive feedback immediately afterwards, too. The main point of the evening is to socialise and have fun, and there was plenty of that, with Old Elizabethans keen to catch up with old friends and staff. I was also very pleased that so many of our old boys were keen to offer their support to the School.

“To any OEs who missed out this year, may I encourage you to make a note to be there next November, while to those who were there, see you again!”

Among the ten-year leavers (2014’s Year 13) were the current Head of Year 12, Akhil Gohil, and former head of Library Services and Curator of QE Collections Surya Bowyer. Other former staff in attendance included the 1999–2011 Headmaster, Dr John Marincowitz; Eric Houston, who currently serves as President of the OE Association, alongside his governance roles; and erstwhile luminaries of the PE & Games department Tim Bennett and David Maughan.

Before dinner, a string quartet drawn from Years 9 and 10 entertained guests during the drinks reception, while A-level musicians were on hand after dinner to showcase The Friends’ Recital Hall. Their post-prandial entertainment ranged from singing to pieces played on instruments including the drums, piano and guitar, as well as on the electric organ acquired during the anniversary year.

Guests enjoyed seeing recent additions to the facilities, such as The Robert Dudley Studio, which opened this year, while also appreciating a trip down memory lane as they visited  parts of the School campus more recognisable to them.

The Eric Shearly Award was presented to the 2024 School Captain Chanakya Seetharam, of Year 13. The citation, which was read by Chairman of the OE Association Martyn Bradish (OE 1962–1969), stated that Chanakya had “always been a role model for others, as a form captain, a peer mentor, a junior prefect and a leading musician”.

Chanakya, who is currently applying to read Law at university, had been “an extremely popular choice among his fellow students, as well as those who teach him” at the time he was chosen for the School Captain’s role last year, the citation added.

• Click on the thumbnails below to view the images. A full set is available on the QE Connect platform, for registered users within our alumni community.

Queen Elizabeth’s School remembered its war dead in traditional fashion with a wreath-laying ceremony, the 11am two-minutes silence, and the participation of the Combined Cadet Force in the High Barnet Remembrance Sunday parade.

But this year has also seen some of the youngest boys wax lyrical in a poetry competition, one Old Elizabethan publish a novel based on the experiences of a soldier in the two world wars, and hundreds of pupils and staff take part in a Remembrance Day quiz.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “We reflected with gratitude on those whose service in sacrifice in the two world wars and other conflicts paved the way for the peace and freedom we enjoy today, while also being mindful that wars are raging today in various places around the world, with all the horrors that that entails.”

At the School, the Armistice Day wreath-laying took place at the memorial to Elizabethans lost in the First World War. The CCF led the proceedings, with the Last Post and Reveille played by Year 13 trumpeter Joel Swedensky.

The School observed the national silence, with a silence also held before each of the weekend’s rugby fixtures.

On Sunday, the parade took the CCF members from the Army Reserve Centre on St Albans Road to the parish church. After the church service, Last Post and a wreath-laying ceremony, the boys joined in the march-past, with the Representative Deputy Lieutenant of the London Borough of Barnet, Martin Russell, taking the salute.

More than 600 pupils and staff took part in QE’s Remembrance Day quiz. Presented to the boys in a colourful PowerPoint presentation, its 18 multiple-choice questions included both some relating to international matters and others directly connected to the School. Here are three examples (scroll to the bottom to see the answers):

1. After the outbreak of war in 1914, QE offered scholarships to refugees from which country?
2. On 11^th November 1941, QE was hit during the Blitz. The bombs damaged the old refectory and which other area of the School?
3. Where did QE’s loyalties lie during the English Civil War (1642–1651), and why?

The quiz was fiercely contested by the boys: none got full marks, but Krithin Jaichandran, of Year 12, achieved 15/16. The staff winner was English teacher Yioda Menelaou.

One 2024 leaver, Tharun Dhamodharan, has recently published a novel that spans both the First and Second World Wars. It tells the story of a former soldier at the Somme who later becomes a teacher and has to confront his memories in the classroom during the Second World War. A copy of the novel, entitled The Forgotten Warrior, is available in The Queen’s Library. Tharun thanked Jenni Blackford, Head of Library Services, for her help and guidance.

Earlier this term, to coincide with International Day of Peace, pupils in Year 7’s Underne form wrote poems about peace. The winning poem was written by Vivaan Karalkar. It was picked by Head of English Robert Hyland, who described it as “very good indeed”. He praised its “creative use of perspective and form, using the 1st person to tell the story with imaginative use of rhyming, and presenting peace in an original way through the imagery of strength”.

The poem, set out below, was also the popular choice among the boys.

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I fly through the breeze, a wave of calm,

I lurk in the tides, tranquillity my psalm,

Warm and comfortable, I surround you, a fleece,

I protect you from war, for I am peace.

 

I live in the soul, free and untouched,

Unrest and violence, my power has crushed,

In frightened hearts and minds, my strength will soothe,

For I am peace, bound to protect you.

 

I flow through all blood, an endless force of qi,

I thrive in all places, whatever there is to see,

I am passed down from generations, a young face looking into an old,

For I am peace, a fire against the cold.

 

Life can be a struggle, a perpetual night,

But war and unrest can truly make light flight,

But fear not now, I’ll tug you from quicksand,

For I am peace,

Ready to make a stand.

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Remembrance Day quiz answers

1. Belgium
2. Rooms L and Y
3. The School was on the royalist side because many of the Governors had royalist sympathies.

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• Click on the thumbnails to view the images below.

Old Elizabethan Sir Demis Hassabis has been awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry, jointly with a colleague at the AI company he founded and with an American scientist.

Demis (OE 1988–1990), who is the co-founder and CEO of AI company Google DeepMind, receives half of the prize with his DeepMind colleague, Dr John Jumper, for their work on predicting complex protein structures. The other half of the prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes to Professor David Baker, from the University of Washington, for his work on protein design.

In their statement, the prize committee wrote: “Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

“Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough.

“In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.”

The Nobel Committee emphasised the global impact of AlphaFold2. It has been accessed by more than two million researchers from 190 countries. Examples of its many applications include: helping scientists to understand better antibiotic resistance; and creating images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Reacting to the news, Demis, 48, said: “It’s totally surreal to be honest, quite overwhelming.”

He explained the “funny sequence” through which he actually heard the news that he was a Nobel laureate. Since the committee did not apparently have a telephone number for him, they had reached him through a Teams call to his wife, who was working on her laptop at the time. After at first ignoring it, she answered it at around the third or fourth call. The caller then requested to be put in touch with Demis, whom they asked for Dr Jumper’s number.

Demis thanked his colleagues, including Dr Jumper, adding: “David Baker we’ve got to know in the last few years, and he’s done some absolutely seminal work in protein design. So it’s really, really exciting to receive the prize with both of them.”

The Nobel prize committee praised the work of Professor Baker, which he began in 2003, saying that he had “succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

The committee’s statement concluded: “Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.”

The illustration above shows a selection of protein structures determined using AlfaFold2 (©Terezia Kovalova/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences).

• The scientific background to the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry can be read here. A popular-level introduction is available here.

 

 

Three Old Elizabethan entrepreneurs in San Francisco have linked up and are now connecting with other alumni working in the world’s leading centre for technology companies.

Pavir Patel sent Headmaster Neil Enright the above photo of himself, Akshat Sharma and Richard Ou together in San Francisco. The three only discovered that they had the same alma mater through chance conversations, but, since then, they have created a group chat and have been expanding it to include more OEs in and around the Bay Area.

Mr Enright said: “Our alumni network has been growing rapidly in recent years, with leavers supporting each other, sharing professional opportunities and socialising together. Especially for alumni far from home, like Richard, Akshat and Pavir, it can be good to spend time with others who share a similar background. As a School, we are doing all we can to support such connections through our QE Connect social and business network.”

Richard (OE 2010–2015) said: “All three of us are founders looking to build billion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley. Quite a few QE boys that I’ve met in the US have been entrepreneurs, too, all having raised not so insignificant amounts of capital. It feels like we’re following in the footsteps of Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, maybe a few years or a decade behind.” (Demis [OE 1988–1990] and Mustafa [1995–2002] were among the three co-founders of leading AI company DeepMind, formed in 2010.)

“What I am really excited about is more people from QE coming to the US. I think this is the place to be,” Richard added.

Pavir (OE 2003–2010) and Akshat (2012–2019) are part of the long-established international Entrepreneur First accelerator, which runs one of its four programmes in San Francisco. “However, they’d not met until after Pavir’s encounter with me,” says Richard. “I met Pavir at a FinTech AI hackathon hosted at the Digital Garage office in San Francisco. The conversation went something like this:”

Richard: “Where in the UK are you from?”

Pavir: “London, what about you?”

Richard: “I’m from London as well. Whereabouts?”

Pavir: “Stratford, and you?”

Richard: “Highgate”

Pavir: “I used to go to school up north of Highgate!”

Richard: “Really, where?”

Pavir: “QE Boys”

Richard: “Holy sh*t, I went to QE as well!”

Richard later met Akshat at the Entrepreneur First office.

As for Pavir and Akshat, they knew each other through being in the same accelerator, but did not realise the full extent of their connection until a conversation in a Waymo (self-driving car) turned to their backgrounds. “It was surreal,” said Akshat. “We were mates already and were speaking about our homes in the UK and school experiences…and there was a moment of realisation of ‘Wait a second – that sounds very familiar’ when we realised we both went to QE!”

Richard said he realised even before going to university where he needed to be to pursue his goal of founding and growing a startup. “I knew that if I wanted to do it, the only place I could was the US. The problem was that education in the US was so expensive – four years of a degree course can easily be $250,000.”

The solution he arrived at was to go to King’s College London, majoring in Physics (“my passion”) for his first degree and then come to the US for a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania – “only two years!” He worked out some further ways to reduce the financial burden, including becoming a Resident Advisor (RA) – a peer mentor for other students – which comes with the major plus that free housing and food are provided.

The idea for his business came about when he graduated from ‘Penn.’ last year and was looking for a graduation photographer. “I realised it was really hard – there is not really any infrastructure for freelancing.”

With time on his hands, he worked out a plan for a business to put that right, checking that he had a Minimum Viable Business (MVB). He shared the plan with the photographer he had eventually found, Jerry Cai. “As soon as I pitched it to him, he said: ‘I want in.’”

The two became co-founders of Agorum, described on its website as “a freelancer marketplace connecting clients with skilled creatives”. They have started initially by focusing on freelancers who require a physical presence for their work – photographers, DJs and private chefs.

The process has not always been easy. “Funding was difficult at first. We tried raising funds last year when the economy was not doing very well.”

Since then, however, they have been scaling rapidly, and Richard is focused on taking the business global. Agorum was recently valued at $10m.

“I think what changed things was moving to the Bay area: I don’t think there is an eco-system like the Bay’s that exists anywhere else in the world.”

He acknowledged the help provided by his accelerator – VIP-X (different from Pavir’s and Akshat’s). VIP-X is run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and caters primarily for people associated with Penn. and Wharton. It takes no equity and offers what are essentially grants, not loans.

“I think one of the hardest parts of doing a startup is the loneliness and distance that comes with it,” said Richard. “Few people can relate.” In particular, he has found the constant need for absolute discretion about his plans for the business hard.  “As the CEO, there is only so much you can ever say.”

“As my role has changed from managing a team of 1.5 people to now a team of ten, the problems are constantly evolving.”

“The thing is persistence,” Richard said, stressing the importance of listening to clients, who sometimes provide the only clue as to a way forward.  “There is something about this gut instinct – and it usually comes from your customer. It becomes your driving force.”

Richard has no doubt as to the source of his strength. “When I look back at my time at QE, it was hard. A lot of homework and pressure. Retrospectively, that is what helped, giving me the resilience I am drawing on now. A lot of people have shared that with me, too. Things were always hard, but that raised your tolerance for a lot of things.”

For his part, Akshat is currently building a company called Orbit. The sad truth about the current digital age is that “we have never been historically unhappier,” he said. “Orbit will empower people by making mental health as transparent and actionable as physical health through a non-invasive brain wearable. Orbit is unlocking cognition by building the first foundation model of the brain!”

In addition to his work with Entrepreneur First, Akshat is part of the first cohort of Founders – the University of Cambridge’s own accelerator programme. He graduated from Cambridge in Biomedical Engineering last year, launching Orbit at the start of 2024.

“At the Neuro Optics Lab [in Cambridge], I developed the first, and only, brain computer interface using HD DOT, a novel imaging approach to track human brain function at comparable resolutions to an fMRI. This modality, being cheap, portable and high resolution, is uniquely positioned to create the foundation model of our brains!”

Akshat has won multiple awards at international conferences and is writing a first-author paper on the subject.

By leveraging the novel wearable technology, Orbit is focussing on making brain-tracking as simple and accessible as Fitbit made fitness-tracking – “all in the comfort of your favourite baseball cap or beanie!” as he put it.

“With each version, Orbit builds the largest, real-world brain data-sets to unlock new secrets about the way we perceive the world around us – our cognition. It starts by understanding mental workload and aims to progress to complex mental states, including anxiety, stress and depression. Each version helps us regain control of a new emotion, at each step regaining happiness through giving us a deeper understanding and control of our brain.”

Finally, Pavir Patel’s business is Outerop. Like Akshat’s start-up, it launched at the beginning of this year. Outerop helps grow businesses online using AI, making it easier for them to build high-quality, reliable Large Language Model (LLM) products and to start creating self-optimising LLM pipelines (a series of steps where the output of one is the input of the other). Its slogan is: “Build GenAI products your customers love.”

Since reading Economics at Nottingham, Pavir has, he said, “done all sorts – from incubating J P Morgan’s first AI startup doing NLP; setting up their FinTech team in Asia (Hong Kong was awesome!) and scaling Europe’s leading broker/crypto exchange, Bitpanda Pro, to spinning off a company with a Series A raise [a company’s first significant round of venture-capital financing] to launching an e-commerce business with my wife”.