By Mrs Tollit, Year 10 Form Tutor

On Wednesday 15th November, sixteen of our Year 10s joined together with Harrow’s Year 10s in a Symposium on Bees.

Education is structured as a series of distinct subjects; this project was all about breaking down those boundaries and developing in our students a love to learning for learning’s sake.

Topics on the theme of bees ranged from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee to the economics of the Nigerian honey industry. Each group consisted of two students from NHEHS and two from Harrow.

The symposium, chaired by Dr Pearce, was a culmination of several weeks of work hosted at both schools and via Google Meet. It was planned and organised by NHEHS and Harrow teaching staff from across the academic curriculum from teachers of Classics to teachers of Biology, and led by our own Mr Cryer, Economics. Parents were invited to attend the symposium and were encouraged to give the students’ online feedback on the students’ presentation skills. Both parents and students were invited to quiz the presenters, the room was truly buzzing! After the presentations, the students enjoyed a lovely dinner together in the Library.

This is the fifth time that this joint-symposium has happened and it was widely judged to be the best yet; said one of our students, Niamh S: “It was great working with students from Harrow; they sometimes looked at things from a different perspective which really made me think. I learnt a lot about how to read and analyse a wide range of sources and how to present to an audience. I am so glad I got involved.”