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Sports Day 2019 saw boys competing and having fun together, while producing impressive performances in disciplines ranging from hurdles and javelin to rowing and Eton fives.

More than 730 boys from Years 7–10 took part during the day and, with athletics alone accounting for 53 separate events, some 70 staff were drafted in from all departments to help meet one of the most complex organisational challenges of the School year.

At the conclusion of a day of intense but friendly inter-House competition in good weather, Headmaster Neil Enright presented the much-coveted Sports Day cup to Broughton, narrow winners on 600 points ahead of Underne on 590.

QE’s Head of Rugby James Clarke (OE 1999–2004), who organised the day, said: “It was great to have so many pupils competing and I am grateful to my colleagues for making it all possible. My congratulations go both to Broughton House on their overall victory and to the very many boys from all Houses who performed strongly and, in many cases, achieved personal bests.”

The day’s events began at 10.30am sharp, with: Year 7 & 8 triathlon; Year 7 tug of war; Year 9 table tennis; Year 7 tennis, and with discus, long jump, shot put and high jump for the first three years.

Competitions continued through the morning, with the action varying from the short intensity of 80m hurdles and 100m sprints to the endurance required for the rowing, in which the Houses were allocated two-hour sessions comprising 10-minute stints for each boy.

The afternoon brought the Eton fives and volleyball competitions, as well as the conclusion of the rowing, while the track events continued, culminating in the four 4 x 100m relays for Years 7–10, the all-years 4 x 400m relay and, last of all, the traditional QE Mile.
This event, a 16 x 100m relay pitting boys against staff, was won this year by the staff: “A great win!” added Mr Clarke.

Throughout the day, staff fulfilled roles including timekeeping, race-starting, judging, commentary and photography, as well as general supervision.

The final presentations revealed the six Houses’ overall points tally for the day, as follows:

• Broughton: 600
• Underne: 590
• Harrisons’: 576
• Pearce: 552
• Leicester: 549
• Stapylton: 514.

New School Captain Bhiramah Rammanohar and his team take up their positions today at the start of the new term.

Together with his Senior Vice-Captains Fozy Ahmed and Oscar Smith, he heads a 120-strong group of School officials for 2019, who are all drawn from Year 12.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I congratulate all the prefects upon their well-deserved appointments. They come from a much-liked and well-respected year-group within the School.”

“Bhiramah is a worthy recipient of this honour, as is made clear by a recent School report which described him in these words: ‘One of the most affable, decent young men that one could care to meet or teach; he marries his many innate talents with a determined industry, the combination of which allows him to be successful in all facets of his School life.’”

Bhiramah entered Year 12 in September fresh from celebrating a run of ten grade 9s in his GCSEs – the highest possible grade under the new marking system. His current Head of Year, Lottie Coleman, points to his “compassion, enthusiasm and commitment to all that he does”.

The team of officials includes ten Vice-Captains, six House Captains, six Deputy House Captains and 92 Prefects. One innovation this year is the appointment of three Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Ambassadors – Leo Kucera, Vithusan Kuganathan and Josh Osman: their new positions reflect the increasing focus upon these areas across School life. They have been introduced following discussions conducted with boys through QE’s pupil panel.

“We are committed to nurturing leadership skills among our pupils,” Mr Enright added. “There are opportunities to develop these, beginning from boys’ first arrival in Year 7 and with the prefect system being very much the pinnacle. For those boys who secure a place in this illustrious cohort, there are certainly significant duties and responsibilities, but their positions also serve as a reward for the commitment and broad contributions they have made to the School in their time with us.”

Senior Vice-Captain Fozy Ahmed is a First XV rugby player. Assistant Head David Ryan wrote about him in his Year 11 report that he “sets an excellent example to other students, always acting in a relaxed, but thoughtful manner; he is mature beyond his years but also kind and considerate towards those around him.”

Like the School Captain, Senior Vice-Captain Oscar Smith, performed outstandingly at GCSE, achieving a clean sweep of grade 9s. A particularly keen and able linguist, he is described by Head of Languages Christopher Kidd as “impressive in every way…diligent, industrious and [with] the desire to perform at the very top level. He is mature, acting and working as a young adult, and attaining the results that his hard industry deserves.”

Mr Enright thanked 2018 School Captain Aashish Khimasia and his outgoing team for their efforts and commitment over the course of the year.

From Leonardo da Vinci to Stephen Hawking, this year’s entries to QE’s Science House competition covered a full gamut of top scientists across the ages.

Participants were required to research eminent and unusual scientists and produce a poster. First prize went to Year 7’s Hadi Al-Esia, from Stapylton House, who chose the brilliant, but slightly lesser-known, Nikola Tesla.

“This year we had 25 excellent entries,” said Biology teacher Melanie Haj Hussein. “The competition was open to boys in Years 7 and 8, and the standard was very high. We were very impressed with the effort they had put in. Not only had they chosen interesting scientists, but they had presented the information in creative and engaging ways.”

Hadi’s choice, the Austrian-American scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, was born in what is modern-day Croatia in 1856, but emigrated to America in his early twenties to work at the Edison Machine Works in New York. He worked there for a brief period before striking out on his own and developing the Alternating Current (AC) induction motor and related AC patents.

Hadi’s fact-packed poster featured ‘electric’-style silver writing against a dark-blue background and also used visual effects related to the electricity theme, including a lightning flash and an image of the globe incorporated into a light bulb.

His poster and those of the runners-up, Omar Hashmi, Chanakya Seetharam, Theo Moses and Advik Balaji, all from Year 7, are being displayed in the Science Department.

Broughton successfully took on last year’s champions, Stapylton, in the grand final of QIQE to claim the crown in this year’s inter-House quiz.

The fiercely fought battle in front of the whole of Years 7–10 saw Broughton win with a total of 180 points, ahead of Stapylton’s 100, notwithstanding the presence in the Stapylton team of Year 9 boy Rahul Doshi, who was Channel 4’s Child Genius in 2017.

Both Houses had secured their places in the final after topping their respective group rounds in the earlier stages of the competition, which is modelled on the BBC’s University Challenge.

Organiser James Clarke (OE), who is an Extra-curricular Enrichment Tutor, said: “In recent years, QIQE has established itself as a key fixture within our eclectic programme of events that make up the overall House Competition.

“The final was an exciting and enjoyable event which showcased the boys’ impressive general knowledge and involved their competing under considerable time pressure and in front of a very large and enthusiastic audience of their peers. Credit must go to all the participants, and my congratulations to Broughton.”

Biology teacher Hinesh Shah (OE) acted as quiz master for the final in the Shearly Hall, which followed the familiar format of a starter-for-ten, followed by three bonus questions worth 5 points each, with 5 points lost for those who ‘buzzed’ (or, in fact, raised their paddle) before the question was finished and then got the answer wrong. The final lasted 20 minutes.

Each team comprised one boy from each of years 7, 8, 9 and 10. Boys are restricted to only competing in the quiz once, so, for example, last year’s competitors were ineligible.

While Stapylton were strong on buildings & architecture, car manufacturers, food and capital cities, the Broughton boys’ impressive knowledge of astronomy & astrophysics, television characters, authors, football grounds and film scores helped see them to victory.

The Broughton finalists were: Sultan Khokhar (Year 10); Ishaan Mehta (Year 9), Aradhya Singh (Year 8) and Kaushik Reddy Nakki Reddy (Year 7). Stapylton’s team were: Aarav Shah (Year 10); Rahul Doshi (Year 9); Madhav Menon (Year 8) and Koustuv Bhowmick (Year 7).

The full placings of QE’s six Houses were as follows:
1st – Broughton (180 points in the final; topped their group with 115 points)
2nd – Stapylton (100 points in the final; topped their group with 160 points)
3rd – Underne (115 points in group)
4th – Pearce (110 points in group)
5th – Leicester (95 points in group)
6th – Harrisons’ (50 points)

• How would you have fared? Here are six sample questions. Answers at the bottom.
  1. Puck, Bottom and Titania are all characters in which Shakespeare play?
  2. For this airport code, name the European city that you would be flying to:
  OPO
  3. How many colours are there in the spectrum when white light is separated?
  4. Which recently deceased comic book writer has had a cameo in the majority of Marvel films?
  5. The Allianz Arena football ground is home to which European club?
  6. What is the jellylike material that makes up much of a cell inside the cell membrane?

• Answers:
  1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  2. Porto
  3. Seven
  4. Stan Lee
  5. Bayern Munich
  6. Cytoplasm

Stapylton emerged as winners from the Year 7 House afternoon – an event designed as an enjoyable ice-breaker for the School’s youngest boys.

The reigning champion House and holder of the Eric Shearly Memorial Cup, Stapylton’s prospects for the new academic year were immediately enhanced by its new cohort’s victory.

Head of Extra-Curricular Enrichment Rebecca Grundy said, however, that the event, which came at the end of the first week of term, is primarily aimed at helping all the new boys get to know each other and learn about the key role that the House system plays in QE life.

“In order that they get to know more of their peers, we get them to work in close collaboration within their Houses on a number of competitive tasks against the clock.”

Alongside quizzes and word-searches, there was the challenge of trying to build the tallest self-supporting tower out of nothing but ordinary drinking straws and Sellotape. With only a short amount of time at their disposal, boys had to formulate a plan and execute it – finding a balance between, on the one hand, making it tall enough to be in with a chance of victory and, on the other, ensuring that it was stable enough to be free-standing and so avoid disqualification.

“It was fevered and, at times, frantic, but the boys all seemed very engaged in their attempts to win their first points for their House,” said Miss Grundy, who organised and led the afternoon. “Stapylton won both the tower challenge and the word-search, helping them to overall victory, with Underne in second place.”

Equipped only with card and drinking straws, Year 10 boys had to be constructively creative during an architecture event held as part of QE’s Enrichment Week.

For the challenge run by the Art department, House teams were asked to make an architectural structure made up of modular forms, with a theme of Folded Architecture.

Two of 2017’s Year 13 leavers, Nabil Haque and Tochi Onuora, who are both studying Architecture at Cambridge, came back to help.

Towards the end of the day, the participants were instructed to consider what purpose or building form their structure could fulfil. (They had not been told they were making buildings earlier in the day, so that their thinking would not be constrained by notions of what they considered to be normal for buildings.)

With function therefore following form, the six-strong teams decided that what they had designed could be put to use for buildings as diverse as stadia, hospitals, safari lodges and residential accommodation, to name but a few.

The pieces were judged at the end of the event. The Stapylton House team – comprising Alex Aliev, Nikhil Gulshan, Rakul Maheswaran, Jack Runchman, Aqif Choudhury, Riaz Kalim and Jude Miranda – won overall. Their contribution was praised for the way that it essentially used the same hexagonal shape repeatedly to build up the structure and create something very stable, yet still architecturally interesting.

Head of Art Stephen Buckeridge reported that the two visiting Old Elizabethans were very complimentary about the boys’ innovation, lateral thinking and openness to exploring new ways of thinking. He added that the models looked very professional, considering the time spent and rudimentary nature of the materials used. In fact, so good were the models that a small exhibition was staged to give other staff a chance to see them.