This week, 50 Year 13 NLCS students travelled to Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet to take part in our annual cross-curricular academic symposium.
This event is deliberately placed in the window between university entrance examinations and forthcoming interviews so that our students prepare by means of particularly scholarly engagement with their subject beyond the curriculum, and by speaking about, and exchanging, formative ideas. The subject areas this year we shared with QE were Law, Medicine, Science, Maths/Computing, Engineering, Psychology and Sociology, and Economics. This year, we took ideas of ‘sustainability’ as our overall theme, placing an emphasis not merely on the process in ecological and scientific terms, but also on concepts such as longevity, heritage, legacy and endurance.
Well in advance, the students were asked to select a topic and a source material from which they then prepared a presentation of around 5 minutes. Working in groups of around 10 on the day – made up of both schools – the students then presented and discussed their ideas, overseen with a light touch by a teacher-chair. Many years of such partnership work have proved to us at NLCS the great worth of students moving beyond their immediate environment through purposeful work with other schools, and of immersing themselves in independent reading and research.
Some of this year’s topics were:
‘’Sustainable rocketry’ (Engineering); ‘Bioluminescent Bacteria as a Sustainable Light Source’ (Physics/Science); ‘An evaluation of biodegradable polyesters specifically those used in sports T-Shirts’ (Natural Science); ‘Making the NHS greener’ (Medicine); ‘Carbon pricing: A market-based Approach to mitigating Climate Change’ (Economics); ‘The Psychology of the sustainability of happiness’ (Psychology).
NLCS looks forward to working again with Queen Elizabeth’s School next term when 20 Year 7 students from each school will come together for a day studying environmental issues, and then again in early July when each of the year 10 cohorts will work together on another cross-curricular academic symposium.
