Last academic year, ten students from Year 10 worked together with their counterparts from Harrow to collaborate and produce “Ancient Alexandria” a collection of essays on a fascinating time and place in history, brought together as an academic publication.

The concept behind the collaboration was to extend scholars from both schools beyond the curriculum, and encourage academic exploration. The theme of Ancient Alexandria was chosen because of its potential to be explored across a variety of academic disciplines, from Mathematics to Geography and Religious Studies. The project was initially conceived by Ms Copin, Deputy Head (Academic) and Miss Fox, then Master in Charge of Scholars at Harrow, and expertly navigated by Mr Livings (Academic Partnerships Coordinator) and Dr Swallow from the Classics department. Split into pairs, the students were given research questions to explore, which ranged across the sciences and humanities. The project featured in the Independent School’s Magazine here last year.

Topics included questions about Hypatia’s contributions to the mathematics of the time, to how the geography of ancient Alexandria contributed to its fortunes, to questions on archeology and astronomy. All questions asked students to consider, in particular, a piece of scholarly source material.

Working together over the Autumn Term, the NHEHS and Harrow pairs met virtually every Tuesday after school to discuss, plan and research. This culminated in presentations to the Senior Leadership Teams of both schools at the end of the ten weeks, and the production of the academic journal. Remarkably, the entire project took place virtually, a credit to the ingenuity and perseverance of colleagues and students involved.

So successful was this inaugural project that the current Year 10 cohort will be able to take part in their own collaboration this term, on the topic “What is Life?”: this will explore a variety of angles, from Victorian experiments using electricity on frogs, to the famous Game of Life developed by mathematician John Conway, to questions about virology, life in the universe, and representations of Orpheus from classical times to Monteverdi and Gluck’s operas.

As Shreya, one of our students said, ‘The Harrow Project is a unique opportunity to collaborate with peers from another school and challenge yourself beyond the curriculum.’

We look forward to this continued scholarly relationships with our counterparts Harrow, and to discovering what the students will produce this year.