By Ms Copin, Deputy Head (Academic)

This half-term has seen the first meetings of this year’s Year 10 Polymath Project with Harrow School.

The programme follows the success of last year’s “Ancient Alexandria” scholarly collaboration, an initiative which seeks to stretch and challenge talented academic students in both schools, giving them a taste of academic exploration.

Working together under the guidance of Mr Livings, Dr Snook and Dr Pearce, and colleagues from Harrow School, ten NHEHS students “meet” (virtually!) with a counterpart from Harrow every Tuesday. They go through a research question set by colleagues, taking the initiative to guide their own explorations.

This year’s theme, rather cheekily, is “What is Life?”. This will be explored from a variety of angles, all of them academic and none of them existential! In the first session, students studied the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, then in their allocated pairs read source material before starting to explore various lines of enquiry. The areas which students have been set to explore are wide-ranging, and include sciences, literature, art and the humanities.

The coming weeks will see students researching, writing their papers (which will then be compiled into an academic journal) and creating presentations before presenting their findings at Harrow School at the end of the nine weeks. We are hugely grateful to all colleagues who are giving up their time to engage with students on this scholarly pursuit.