A message from the Headmaster

QE Futures is the School’s ambitious programme of careers and universities guidance and support.

Operating across the whole School, QE Futures, with its slogan of Find your path, aims to guide every Elizabethan towards competitive degree-level university or apprenticeship courses and then to help them thrive both at university and beyond.

Now running for some months, QE Futures has already seen the School’s best-ever crop of university offers among the current Year 13.

Please encourage your son to take full advantage of all that the programme offers.

Neil Enright

Headmaster

Helping pupils find their path

Dear parents,

The QE Futures programme is delivered through the pastoral curriculum, assemblies, information evenings, School-based events, work experience placements, university taster & progression activities, and, importantly, through bespoke guidance given in one-to-one conversations.

QE Futures aims to:

• Provide pupils from Years 7–13 with opportunities to engage with universities and employers.
• Broaden horizons so pupils consider careers both within ‘traditional’ professions and beyond, such as in entrepreneurship and emerging sectors.
• Equip our boys with core employability skills that will help them transition successfully from School to university, and from university to work.
• Deliver bespoke guidance on how pupils can best navigate their particular pathway.
• Impart knowledge and advice so that pupils have due confidence when applying for the most competitive and demanding courses or opportunities.

You can read below more about what the programme involves and about our six QE Futures Employability Skills. You can also find out about how QE Futures applies to your son’s age group, and how we will monitor its success. While this QE Update keeps you as parents informed on QE Futures, our senior boys are now being kept up to date through the monthly QE Futures Bulletin, which includes the latest on topics including potential opportunities for online/in-person courses, work experience placements and useful information sources.

With very best wishes,

James Kane Assistant Head (Pupil Destinations)

Getting the measure of QE Futures' success

55% of Year 13 holds offers from among the top five of the QS world university rankings, which include Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge.	A QE record of 62 pupils received Oxford and Cambridge offers, with 90% of boys who applied to these two universities called to interview.
22 of the 24 Russell Group universities have given offers to QE pupils.	Offer-holders include: 45 medics & dentists; 30 engineers; and 26 economists.

To maintain such outstanding success, we will be carefully monitoring outcomes, looking at:

• Number and range of meaningful encounters with employers and/or higher education providers.
• Participation rates in university or work experience opportunities.
• Pupil confidence in applying to university.
• Pupils' reflections on their success against core employability skills.
• Data on university/work destinations and on retention.

QE Futures Employability Skills

Sixth Form: University Support Programme (USP)

We have refreshed the USP, adding new lessons for Year 12 (including Managing the Jump to A-level and Your Future — a careers unit) and Year 13 (improving support for the School-to-university transition). Other innovations include the introduction of guest speakers, with: recent OEs sharing their experiences of higher education; advice from WizeUp! on managing finances as a student; and a lecture from Dr Irit Samet, of King's College London, on what to expect from university. Specifically for Year 12, a new programme of Summer Talks has already seen seven speakers offer sector-specific tips and advice, with more to come (see below). OEs remain heavily involved in mock interviews — more than 75 alumni helped with almost 200 in the Autumn Term. Tutors, subject heads, and assembly speakers continue to complement the USP, providing bespoke guidance and advice, admissions test support, and personal statement help.

STILL TO COME — YEAR 12 SUMMER TALKS

Friday 28 June: Degree apprenticeships — Divyam Shah and Thanojan Sivananthan (both OE 2016-2023)

Tuesday 9 July: Careers in investment banking — Hemang Hirani (OE 2008-2015)

Wednesday 10 July: Careers in chartered accounting — Henry Zhu (OE 2012-2019)

Year 11: Careers Convention 2024

At their Careers Convention in February, Year 11 heard from 16 guest experts, including keynote speaker Kam Taj (OE 2004–2011), who urged pupils to keep an open mind when considering their futures, and speakers from law, medicine, science & technology, and business & finance. Forty guests supported the afternoon careers fair, giving boys ample opportunity to meet professionals one-to-one.

Three Year 11 boys gave QE Update their feedback:

Trishan Chanda: “A very fruitful day, providing a platform to meet people in the field we potentially want to enter, and an embryonic overview and basic knowledge of those fields. We were able to increase our network and gather insight into how to secure work experience for this summer.”

Neev Dhall: “I found someone who took a very similar path to the one I wish to take, and so was able to gain a thorough understanding of what steps to take…to reach my goal of working at CERN as a physicist.”

Jainam Mehta: “Very useful – it has allowed me to explore different jobs and careers, some of which I would have never thought of. In addition, it helped me network through QE Connect.”

Lower School: Careers in the curriculum, Futures Day and special assemblies

The careers section of the Year 9 pastoral curriculum was re-planned from scratch to enable boys to engage live with their Unifrog accounts during their Personal Development Time lessons, making full use of their newly issued 1:1 devices. Among the topics they looked at were: career journeys; GCSE options; and What are my skills?

The first-ever Futures Day brought together all Year 9 for a ‘drop-down’ (off-timetable) event focussed on entrepreneurialism. Boys engaged first with entrepreneur and educator Amanda Slavin’s LearningFREQUENCY website which produced a bespoke ‘bot’ for each pupil based on his individual approaches to learning. They then worked in groups to invent an environmentally friendly product that would appeal to their generation, before presenting it Dragons Den-style. “Amanda is well respected, and she provided boys with an important (and enjoyable!) opportunity to further develop the QE Futures Employability Skills in themselves,” said Mr Kane.

Theatre writer and director Neetu Singh’s talk to Years 8 and 10 was a “real highlight” of a new programme of QE Futures speakers for Lower School assemblies, says Mr Kane. “Being from a south Asian heritage, she was able to relate to many of our students here at QE.” Neetu is an Oxford English Literature graduate currently studying towards a Master’s in Creative Writing at Cambridge. She was Assistant Director of The Cherry Orchard, which closed on Saturday after a successful run at the Donmar Warehouse.