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Academic Makoto Takahashi, who has earned an international reputation for his research into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan, has curated an exhibition on the disaster, which is being shown at the Royal Geographical Society.

The exhibition, which runs until 23rd December, marks the tenth anniversary of the meltdown, and of the earthquake and tsunami that triggered it. Visitors have included a party of A-level Geography and Art students from QE: Makoto treated them to a lecture on the exhibition and also gave them a guided tour.

Makoto (OE 2003–2010) is the youngest-ever lecturer at the Munich Centre for Technology in Society (MCTS), part of the Technical University of Munich, a position he gained in 2019. A previous holder of a Science and Technology Studies Fellowship at Harvard, he will be returning to the Harvard Kennedy School of Governance as a Fulbright-Lloyd’s Fellow in early 2022.

For the past eight years, his work has focused on examining how expert authority is claimed in conditions of low public trust. Considered somewhat niche when Makoto first proposed it as his field of study in 2013, its relevance became apparent in 2016 with the election of President Donald Trump.

“In fact, I was at an OECD Nuclear Energy Agency event in Fukushima prefecture on the day that Trump was elected,” he says. “The shock was palpable. And the parallels between the crisis of confidence that Japanese experts faced following ‘3.11’ [the earthquake and tsunami took place on 11th March 2011] and the ‘post-truth’ political moment were clear.”

The exhibition, entitled Picturing the Invisible, sees his research interests coming together with his longstanding involvement with the London art scene: while in the Sixth Form at QE, he took part in in the Royal Academy’s attRAct programme and in the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Program; he has also been an Event Manager at the OPEN Ealing community art gallery.

It features the work of six photographers complemented by a series of short essays from policymakers, experts, and activists. The contributors include some “wonderful artists and essayists”, says Makoto, such as: Lieko Shiga, a photographer based in Kitakama, a village hit hard by the tsunami; Yoi Kawakubo, who buries silver halide film in the contaminated soils of Fukushima’s exclusion zone to produce a powerful series of abstract images, and Sir David Warren, British Ambassador to Japan, 2008–12.

A collaboration between the RGS and the Munich Centre for Technology in Society, the exhibition has secured coverage in publications including The New Statesman and The British Journal of Photography.

In preparing for it, Makoto says he has been committed to pedagogic innovation to benefit students disadvantaged by the impact of Covid-19 on higher education. “The pandemic has robbed students of so much of the normal university experience, so it’s even more important than ever to innovate new modes of engagement. In this spirit, I integrated preparations for Picturing the Invisible into my teaching at MCTS. Seven students from the Responsibility in Science, Engineering and Technology course have been involved in every step of the planning and [have shared] their perspectives on the works in the exhibition programme, alongside seasoned policymakers, activists, and experts.”

After leaving QE, Makoto took a First in Geography at Cambridge, winning the M T Dodds and Rowley Mainhood Awards for academic excellence during the course of his degree. He went on to gain his MPhil and PhD from Cambridge, where his doctoral studies were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

While there, in addition to lecturing, co-ordinating undergraduate groups and working with the university’s Communications Office to produce podcasts for a non-specialist audience, Makoto also served as the secretary of the Mixed Martial Arts Society (CUMMA).

In 2017, he spent three months as a Visiting Research Fellow at Tokyo’s Waseda University, where the proximity to Fukushima proved valuable. “I had the opportunity to interview notable public figures in the Fukushima debate, making regular trips to Fukushima prefecture itself.”

His thesis, The Improvised Expert: Performing Authority after Fukushima (2011–2018), drew upon his own extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Japan; it won the American Association of Geographers’ Jacques May Thesis Prize.

He has presented his work at the Maison Francais d’Oxford (at the invitation of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs), at the British Embassy in Paris, CEPN (Le Centre d’étude sur l’Evaluation de la Protection dans le domaine Nucléaire – a non-profit radiological protection organisation) and gave a paper at a conference organised by the International Commission on Radiological Protection to examine the lessons of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

During his schooldays, Makoto threw himself into all that QE had to offer. He was involved in debating, was the leader of the second violins in the Chamber Orchestra and was in the waterpolo team.

Today, he is still in contact with School friends Eigo Takeda, who read Mathematics at Cambridge before taking up consultancy work in Japan, and Evgeny Slavin, who works in venture capital in Cambridgeshire.

Having previously worked towards a commission with the British Army Reserve, he has had to pause his involvement with the reserves while working outside the UK.

Arjun Paliwal has moved back to London to a new role within Facebook and is now working with clients who are among the world’s biggest brands in the fashion and luxury industry.

The new job – as Client Solutions Manager – marks a further step up for Arjun (OE 2006-2013), who returns to the UK after nearly four years in Ireland, with the last 15 months spent in Dublin as a Senior Account Manager.

He relished the opportunity to live there, and considers the chapter important for not only his professional but also personal growth. “Dublin’s where I began to explore and accept my sexuality,” he says. “In coming to terms with my bisexuality I’ve had to (and will continue to) confront challenging feelings, such as shame – but I’ve also built a confidence I never had before. I bring more of myself to my work and my relationships, which is important because I’m more passionate and focused without spending my energy trying to be someone else.”

Amid all the change, however, one thing remains constant – his commitment to sustainability. “I’ve spent the best part of the last 18 months working to support and grow sustainable businesses. Sustainability is a horizontal across every vertical, so every business needs to be thinking about it, and I’m so excited to see our global teams working to amplify Facebook’s contribution to a sustainable world in the work we do with clients and agencies. This is additional to all the work the company has done and continues to do to be more sustainable, which is exciting to see happen and couldn’t be more urgent.

“I’m excited to take on the responsibility of working with some of our largest global fashion and luxury brands that define industry trends to help them be a force for good through their campaigns and communication on Facebook (FB) and Instagram (IG).”

After QE, Arjun read Fine Art at New College, Oxford, exhibiting in several galleries across the city and having a short film selected for a Ruskin Shorts exhibition.

Graduating in 2017, he joined Facebook in September of that year, initially as an e-commerce Account Manager.

“What I love about working at Facebook is our culture, where you can connect with anyone across the company to share ideas, learn and grow.”

His own career to date is an example of what this culture can produce: “Building a programme for sustainable businesses started as a passionate side project. Today, many coffees and brainstorming sessions later, we’ve got a global team working to support these companies in reaching more customers with their innovations, and senior leads are backing the work.

“My Facebook Dublin chapter has come to an end for now but I’m grateful for the journey I had there, particularly the opportunity to spend more time doing what I love while progressing my career. Being in a smaller city so close to the coast and surrounded by national parks motivated me to spend more time outdoors which I cherished. Whether it was a short walk by the sea during the day or a cycle to the cliffs after work, getting outside kept me sane, centred and humbled, so Dublin has taught me to always make time for that and do what I can to protect those experiences.”

“My journey has also made me much more aware of the importance of diversity and how critical it is to solving challenges such as sustainability. We need more authentic perspectives and experiences at the table,” says Arjun, who added that his own experience coming out – bolstered by his growing “understanding of the intersectionality of diversity and sustainability” – had shown him how important it was for more people to be represented and heard in critical conversations in order to see change.

* Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

When his father told him he wanted to retire and invited him to take over the family coffee business, Colin Smith had already established a successful career in teaching.

There was no obligation for him to make the move – his father had always valued the fact that a QE education gave Colin (OE 1957–1964) opportunities that he had not enjoyed himself. And it was not a decision Colin wanted to take lightly – “I thought about it for around a year”.

But in the end, he was drawn by the challenge and duly made the move, working as the third partner alongside his father and uncle for about two years, before then taking the helm at the business his grandfather had established in 1936.

Since switching careers in 1980, he has not only greatly expanded Smiths Coffee Company, but has also established himself as an international award-winning expert in specialist coffee, while putting his expertise to use in charitable and philanthropic work, too.

“With the knowledge I have accumulated through many years of experience in the coffee industry, I am attempting to create a much better coffee world,” he says.

Colin has many happy memories of the education that his father so prized. He was a regular QE actor – appearing, for example, as the Dauphin in George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan and as Mrs Hardcastle in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.

A Sub Prefect and a keen athlete, he was also editor of the Elizabethan magazine, sang in the School Choir and did Scottish dancing in a club run by Languages teacher (and Old Elizabethan) Derek Fry, where the boys enjoyed the chance to dance with their counterparts from Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School.

“John Todd and I were the first pupils to take A-level RE, under the personal supervision of John Pearce (Deputy Headmaster – Second Master), who gave up his free time to tutor us,” says Colin, who won the Broughton Divinity Prize.

Colin was heavily involved in scouting activities, representing Hertfordshire at the Marathon Scout Jamboree 1964 and becoming a Queen’s Scout – the highest award given in the movement.

He also secured his Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award. “I remember asking Mr Edwards [Headmaster Timothy Edwards] for a day off to go to the presentation at Buckingham Palace, showing him the card from the equerry to Prince Philip. His comment was: ‘I don’t think I have much say in the matter; my authority doesn’t go that far.’”

After leaving QE, he went to St Luke’s, a teacher-training college that is now part of the University of Exeter, where he studied PE & Biology, took up fencing and sang in the college’s Chapel Choir.

Qualifying as a PE teacher, from 1967 to 1971 he taught at Beaumont School, St Albans, becoming head of department there.

He took a year out to study Laban Movement at the Art of Movement Studio in Addlestone and then moved to become Head of PE and head of year at Oldborough Manor School, Maidstone, Kent.

Even when he took over his father and uncle’s business, his links with education remained strong. He served as a Governor of Dollis School in Hendon for 15 years until his company moved from its factory in Mill Hill to new premises – a factory in Hemel Hempstead – in 1997.

“The company has developed from roasting coffee in a shop window at my grandfather’s grocer’s shop in Mill Hill in 1936. Smith’s Coffee Company now roast around approximately 10 tonnes of coffee per week for the retail and catering markets. I am also a partner in a small shop roasting business in Leighton Buzzard.”

Smiths Coffee Company specialises in quality coffees and teas and has an organic and Fairtrade branch, The Natural Coffee Company. “We also have a company, Arabica Espresso Services, which supplies & maintains espresso machines & coffee making equipment.”

Five years ago, Smiths developed a process for flavouring coffee to meet an ever-increasing market: “Now we are probably the biggest coffee flavourist in the UK”.

Having won major contracts over the years, such as roasting coffee for Whittard’s 125 shops, the company has grown and today it continues to expand: it recently secured a major account with Warner Leisure Hotels. As a result of this expansion, it is looking for new premises once again.

“I was a founder member of the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) in 1997 and was President from 2005-2007,” says Colin. He served on the board of directors until 2011 and in recent years has organised around 18 trips so that members can visit places where coffee is grown – around three a year. The countries visited include India, Kenya, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, Honduras, Sumatra, Tanzania, Panama, Papua New Guinea and the US (Hawaii).

“Visiting the farms and tasting the coffees at origin has expanded my experience and knowledge of the product, with its progress through the roasting, cupping and blending processes.”

He has also organised SCAE educational activities and assisted in the arrangements for the SCAE World of Coffee event each year. “I have represented the SCAE in Japan, Costa Rica, USA, Sumatra and many other countries and in 2006, I represented Europe on the panel of judges who cupped the coffees for the Costa Rica Cosecha d’Oro, at their invitation. I appeared on TV to discuss the importance of quality coffee to the European market. I am also asked occasionally by local radio to comment on various aspects of the trade. The last one was on Kopi Luwak, a very rare and expensive coffee!”

He is a member of a four-strong Which magazine panel which samples and assesses retail coffee products. In December 2011, he was awarded the Allegra European Coffee Award for outstanding contribution to the European Coffee Industry and in June 2013 the SCAE Award for Excellence: Lifetime Achievement Award.

“My extensive knowledge of the subject enables me to give many talks and lectures on all aspects of coffee, as well as training sessions on the use of coffee-making machinery. I am often asked to give advice on the setting up of roasting plants and coffee shops.

“The knowledge gained through all this experience has helped the company to focus on a range of coffees, from real speciality to good grade coffees for the selective market.”

In 2017, the SCAE combined with the Specialty Coffee Association of America to form the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), for which Colin is an Ambassador.

“My ethos is to educate members of the coffee industry and the consumer to understand the value of speciality coffee.  This will further the speciality coffee market and enable more people to assess the quality of better coffee.”

He also puts his expertise and knowledge to good use in serving wider society. He maintains close contact with the local Hospice of St Francis’s Corporate Partnership Committee on a voluntary basis, supporting many of their events with supplies of coffees. “I also give many talks on coffee and the money raised is used to support the St Francis hospices and the Peace Hospice in Watford.”

A qualified SCA trainer, he has worked with local prisons to train prisoners in a rehabilitation programme before release. “Until December 2019, at The Mount Prison and Bedford Prison, we had a café in the visitors’ room which enabled the prisoners to gain experience in communication with the public and to practise the skills learned in taking the Speciality Coffee Association (SCA) barista Foundation Course. Profits gained from the cafes were given to HACRO, the Hertfordshire Association for the Rehabilitation of Offenders.”

Colin lives in Berkhamsted and is married to Marina, his second wife. Between them, they have 13 grandchildren. He has two daughters with his first wife, Sue, and one with Marina.  “Also on a personal level, after 40 years I no longer play hockey for St Albans, but I am I am trying to play golf.”

When Fabio Castagno entered the world of finance after completing his engineering degree 11 years ago, it was definitely not the career path he had planned – yet today he is Chief Operating Officer of an alternative investment firm and has just launched his fourth hedge fund.

And while it is certainly an achievement to have become a COO so early in his career, Fabio (OE 1999–2006) says it is not the job title that means the most to him.

“I gain far more satisfaction from the respect and trust that I have from my colleagues who are generally veterans of the industry and have much more experience than I do. Opinions and decisions that I make are heard and acted on; this sense of responsibility is probably what I value the most.”

Fabio went from QE to read Civil Engineering at UCL, gaining a first-class Master’s degree and a Dean’s List commendation for outstanding academic performance.

“I really enjoyed studying civil engineering at university: I enjoy understanding how things work and making something that is greater than the sum of its parts. However, I graduated at the height of the financial crisis, and engineering jobs were scarce.

“I decided to apply for banking internships in my final year, so that I could work through the summer once I finished my Master’s and then take a year off.”

“The first internship I got, I took – which in hindsight, I regret: I think at the time I didn’t have enough confidence in myself.”

Nevertheless, Fabio did the internship. He was duly offered a job and started working for UBS Investment Bank in September 2011.

“I must also admit, I got very lucky at this point; I had a manager who took a liking to me and very much took me under his wing. I owe him a lot. When he left UBS, he brought me along with him to Cheyne Capital, where I got my first taste of the hedge fund world.

“And once again, I got lucky: the fund I moved to had been around for a long time, which meant that they had a lot of processes that they just did because no one had questioned them before. This gave me a lot of opportunity to streamline processes and make the most of what is available, which I really love doing.”

He remained there for two years, quitting in mid-2015 to go travelling for a year with Rhea Wolvekamp, who is now his wife. “We started in Thailand and went to Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, India, China, Hong Kong and Japan.”

He secured a job at his current firm, London-based Blueglen Investment Partners, in January 2017 and was promoted to COO in February last year.

“I joined Blueglen with only four years’ experience working in a fund and having just spent 18 months travelling the world. The learning curve was extremely steep: I had worked at hedge funds before, but never launched one – and we have just launched our fourth.

“My ‘day-to-day’ is largely communicating with various stakeholders – we have quite a small internal team and outsource a lot of the functions that you typically find in a hedge fund. It makes it a very broad role. It’s generally managing projects or issues, which means that one week can look very different to another. It also means that I know every part of the fund, and how it functions, very well.”

Although Covid obviously brought a temporary halt to travelling – which has he says has proved a struggle for him and his wife – it remains his main hobby. “My wife and I met in Thailand while I was travelling with another QE ‘alumn’, Anand Dattani (OE 1999–2006), in 2011.” (He and Anand share happy memories of their A-level Geography classes with current Headmaster Neil Enright.)

“Since then, I have tried to go on holiday as often as possible – agreed that that’s not environmentally friendly, but we try as much as possible in our personal lives to offset the carbon emissions, a potentially futile attempt.”

 

 

As an academic scientist and a world-renowned first responder to oil spills, Ed Owens has had a more varied life than most – and certainly one with more than its fair share of excitement.

He has worked on some of the world’s biggest and most infamous spills, such as Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989 and the Deepwater Horizon BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

At a rough count, Ed (OE 1956–1964) has travelled to more than 70 countries over his long career, including frequent visits to some of the planet’s most remote locations. He has survived involvement in “a couple of aircraft crashes”,  being chased by the Argentine army, and being kidnapped in the Amazon; he has run training for coastguards all over the world, and he has trained sniffer dogs to detect oil leaks underground.

In the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ed made five or six visits annually to work on the development of oil fields on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. “I have many stories about those trips!”

There was also the time he found himself stuck on an Arctic island without a radio: just one episode in his many visits north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been every year for more than three decades until 2020, when Covid put an end to this remarkable run.

Yet, in speaking to Alumni News, Ed said he prefers to reflect not so much on his own remarkable exploits, but on his origins, on his memories of QE in the 1950s and early 1960s – including what made it a good School even back in those culturally very different days – and on passing on some hard-won advice to the young Elizabethans of today.

“I’m 76 years old, still working full-time, still publishing multiple technical papers each year in scientific peer-reviewed journals, and still loving every day of my family and professional life. A full and productive life.

“How did I get here? My paternal grandfather was a shepherd in Rutland who spent most of his life living outdoors tending the animals year-round. Just coming home on Saturday night to have a beer in the pub, bath on Sunday morning, then church and Sunday lunch with the family and then back to the fields. My maternal grandfather was a ‘horseman’, which in those days meant that he looked after all the horses on the farm. He had Christmas Day off, when the farmer would start the morning routine.

“Out of all the many cousins – I think 15, to be exact – I was the only one that went to grammar school, then I was the only one to go to university until another cousin some 10 years later who, like me, went on to do a PhD.

“Luck? Good fortune? No, not really. As many people have said I wasn’t lucky, but I worked hard – and I also would have to add that many people worked very hard on my behalf: my parents and the teachers at QE, especially my House Master, John (‘Poker’) Pearce, and subsequently a couple of mentors who shaped my professional career.

“Needless to say, the School was very different in my day. While the buildings and grounds still appear familiar, there was a great focus on sport, with Wednesday and Saturday afternoons devoted to the range of seasonal choices, and with classes on Saturday mornings to make up for the ‘lost’ Wednesday afternoons! That did not leave much time for other things, though several of us made up a soccer team that played on Sunday at the Underhill Playing Fields.

“Those days, almost everybody lived in the Barnets or the Borehamwood-Elstree-Brookmans Park area: basically within a ½ hour bus ride of the school. It was a predominantly white Christian population, probably less than 5% non-Christian or otherwise ethnically diverse. And, like today, no girls of course!

“Did that prepare us well for the big wide world? On reflection, in my own very personal situation, for some reason I have been quite oblivious to the ethnicity or the sexual preference of people with whom I interact. Quite often when a third-party says something about that topic, my reaction is ‘oh, I didn’t notice that’. I certainly did not get that from my parents. who were very Victorian and “straight”, so it must have come from the School and the tolerant and intelligent teachers that we were fortunate to have.

“Most of the group at that time were Arsenal supporters because that was the nearest football ground from Barnet by British Rail. I don’t understand why, but a couple of our contemporaries actually supported Chelsea or, even worse, Tottenham! Sadly, Charlie Eggington, the Underne House Captain who followed me, is a Spurs supporter – clearly I failed in that part of mentoring him.

“The point is we still support those teams today when we have our Zoom conference calls. It’s not about football, it’s not about the team; it’s about just following and believing in those things that have some value. The great thing about sports is that the results are totally unpredictable. That gives enjoyment to following whatever sport, whatever team, whatever person one might be interested in following.”

Ed stayed on into the Seventh Form and was a Prefect and the House Captain for Underne. On leaving QE, he took his first degree, in Geology/Earth Science at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth – “three amazing years of playing rugby, rock climbing and mountaineering”.

After that, he wanted to take a postgraduate degree – “go to grad school” in American parlance – but there were limited opportunities at that time in the UK, a country which, as Ed points out, was still recovering economically from the Second World War and had yet to develop North Sea Oil. So, in 1967, he went to Canada on a graduate student fellowship to take his Master’s in Physical Geography at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His new life got off to an exciting start: “On Day 7 in North America, I was on a four-engine Super Constellation flying to a remote field camp in the High Arctic, north of the 60^th parallel!”

That first Arctic trip set a travel of pattern which was to become the norm in the decades to come. “Some years, I was in more than ten countries – a whirlwind life.”

His first experience as an oil spill first responder came in March 1970 at an oil tanker spill in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was five years after this that he completed his PhD at the University of South Carolina in 1975.

In 1993, he established his own company, Owens Coastal Consultants, which for the past 28 years has been providing worldwide scientific and technical support for spill response operations and spill response planning and training. Today, he is based on Bainbridge Island in the State of Washington, with a rural office from where he can look east towards nearby Seattle.

“My roles in all of this are as a response operations planner, a first responder to develop strategies to accelerate environmental recovery, and a scientist to monitor that recovery. While major spills can certainly have a disastrous on nature in the very short term, long-term studies have shown how remarkably well and quickly the environment recovers from even large oil spills.”

His most recent spill was in late November 2020 at a pipeline break in the suburban San Francisco Bay area, where he had to contend with Covid constraints and where he used dogs – ‘Oil Detection Canines’, in the industry jargon – to find the leak.

Over the years, he has been called out to destinations as far flung as Arctic Russia, the Amazon and the Middle East (he cherishes memories of seeing Dubai Creek in its pre-development days).

“But,” he adds, “I always seemed to managed to arrange my schedule to be on a business trip so that I could be in London during the first week in December for the Annual Brewer’s Dozen Dinner, joining a motley group of 15 friends – mainly 1962-65 First XV rugby players – which included two School Captains, multiple House Captains and even one person who did not go to QE!  Such was the bond formed at the School – quite remarkable. The chain was not broken even in 2020, but then it had to be by Zoom.”

Sadly, since that last meeting, the group has been depleted by the death within a few days of each other of two of Ed’s very close friends – Richard Newton (School Captain 1963-64 and First XV and First X1 Captain; Head Boy of Harrisons’: School Governor in the 1980s) and Roderick ‘Rod’ Jones (Prefect and First XV Captain 1964-65; Head Boy of Staplyton).

As he looks back on a career that now spans more than half a century, Ed counsels patience for current pupils and recent alumni of the School: “It’s important to remember that your first job is not your last job. I went through a progression of working in government, university and then private sector consulting. My real career path really did not emerge until I was 35 years old! Which, if you put in perspective, it means that I had been working after graduation for 14 years. I’m now over 75, 40 years later.

“So, there’s no need to be in a hurry – to think that when you leave QE or leave university or college that this is going to be the single path that you’ll follow for the rest of your life. There are many twists and turns; the important thing is to understand when choices present themselves to go with your heart. If you’re never happy in your work, you’ll never be happy in your life! That’s why I’m still working at 75-plus – and all the other aspects of a balanced life – family, social activities, and so on – are reinforced by that solid foundation.”

• Pictured, top to bottom: a winter beach survey on Unalaska Island, Alaska, in April 2005; presenting a paper at the 2017 International Oil Spill Conference in Long Beach, California; in front of QE’s Main Building in July 1962; at Resolute, North West Territories, Canada, August 1967: Ed (wearing the red cap, centre), briefing Admiral Yost, the United States Coast Guard Commandant, to his right, during a shoreline inspection following the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Prince William Sound, Alaska, May 1989: Colville Delta, North Slope, Alaska August 2002.

I began my report in the Christmas edition of Alumni News by stating that the Autumn Term had felt “much more normal”; as I now look back on the past three months, that is certainly not a phrase which I would employ to characterise this Spring Term.

From the very start, we faced rapidly changing circumstances, firstly gearing up to run a testing programme in early January, and then having to put it on hold at the eleventh hour as the country abruptly entered a further lockdown and we reverted to remote learning for all the boys.

Once again, both staff and pupils have demonstrated very commendable adaptability, even in the face of often-worrying news about the national and international situation, and, for some, closer to home, too. We have stuck together as a community, and there has been a resilient determination among my colleagues to ensure that boys at Queen Elizabeth’s School continue to receive an excellent education in the difficult circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Thanks to an extraordinary amount of work and a great deal of flexibility, our teachers and support staff have now developed very considerable expertise in using MS Teams and the resources and tools available through eQE, such that they are able to deliver an online school which is the envy of many, and which replicates as closely as possible the normal, rich QE classroom experience.

The whole Elizabethan community was seen at its very best recently, when everyone contributed to making sure that we had a wonderful reopening on 11^th March. The in-school testing programme was an unprecedented logistical challenge which, of course, had to be carried out in strictly controlled conditions to ensure it was Covid-safe: I heartily commend the commitment of our volunteers and staff who ran it so cheerfully and efficiently, and I give my thanks to QE parents and boys who played their part by signing up in great numbers for the tests.

We have maintained an extra-curricular programme, adapting activities as necessary so that we can continue with as many of them as possible. The 2021 QE University Convention, held over the final week-and-a-half of term, is a fine example of the way in which we have ‘flexed’ to ensure that important events in the School calendar are retained in order that pupils do not miss out on opportunities.

It has also reflected one of the really characteristic aspects of the lockdown, namely the enthusiastic engagement of our alumni in supporting current pupils, aided by our QE Connect platform and the new technology we are using as a School. Well over 50 alumni were scheduled over the 19 sessions and, as has become customary, most, although not all, were those who left QE last summer. They were therefore able to relate to our current pupils their experiences of their first two terms at university during this pandemic.

We have also welcomed a number of alumni during the term as virtual speakers. They include football agent Max Hassell (OE 2002–2009) who reflected on his diagnosed ADHD, anxiety and depression in a talk to senior pupils in a talk during Children’s Mental Health Week, and Bilal Harry Khan (OE 2003-2009) who took part in our new series of bitesize Perspective discussions, speaking about why ‘micro-aggressions’ are so harmful and suggesting ways that the issue can be addressed. My thanks go to all Old Elizabethans who have supported the School this term.

Another major event that was run in adapted form was this week’s Senior Awards. I reiterate the congratulations I offered at the dual ceremonies to all our prize-winners from Years 10–13.

One very bright spot that came in the darkest days of the shutdown was the announcement that our boys had secured 39 offers of places from Oxford and Cambridge. That is a very remarkable total, second only to last year’s highest-ever tally of 40 places offered. Yet in one sense, it is also an encouraging indication of ‘business as usual’ – a sign that, pandemic or no pandemic, we will continue to nurture our very able students, fostering in them a love of learning, high-level thinking and deep intellectual curiosity, and preparing them to thrive at the world’s best universities and in their careers.

Our new School Development Plan launched at the start of the term will play a considerable part in helping us achieve that. To amplify further our current distinction as a School, we recognise in the plan that we must ensure that the mix of attributes and skills we develop in our boys remains relevant in a world, which, as the last 12 months have demonstrated, is fast-changing and sometimes unpredictable. I am pleased that the plan was so well-received, and I look forward to working with colleagues to implement it over the next four years.

Through all the turmoil of recent months, work on the Music School building project has continued unabated, and we remain on schedule to open this exciting new facility in the autumn of this year.

As we look forward to the Summer Term, we have a carefully worked-out plan in place for our GCSE, AS and A2 cohorts. Boys in Years 11, 12 and 13 have a lot of work to do in terms of the final summative assessments that they will be taking in the early weeks of the term. All the best to them as they embark on their last push with their revision and preparation! Year 12 will then quickly be moving on to A-level preparation for their final examinations in the summer of 2022. We also have a programme for Year 11 – a bridge between GCSE studies and the Sixth Form – so that they can use their time productively.

While certain aspects inevitably remain uncertain, we hope that the next term will see a period of stability as the country progressively emerges from this crisis.

In the meantime, my warm wishes go to all alumni.

Neil Enright

Headmaster