Page 7 - ES MAG 2018 dig

Acting
Headmaster’s

Message

As I reect on a busy and successful school year to write this article, the honour and pride I felt on being
tasked with leading our school as Acting Headmaster is tempered by the tragic loss of our esteemed
colleague/teacher Mr George Hadjigeorgiou and his wife Dina. Mr Hadjigeorgiou worked at the school
for 29 years, making a signicant contribution to the Mathematics Department and the wider life of the
school. He will be greatly missed and our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this very dicult time.

The year started on a very positive note with an outstanding set of public examination results which
once again ranked our school in the top 30 independent schools who publish their results in the Daily
Telegraph newspaper. As a consequence of this, our graduates achieved university places at the very
top UK and US universities: 78% secured places at Russell Group universities, 15 secured places at the
University of Cambridge, 13 students went on to study medicine, while in the US we achieved places at
top ranked institutions including the Ivy League schools of Brown, Dartmouth, UPenn and Princeton.
With university oers for 2018 entry now coming to a close, we can predict similar outstanding results
for this academic year.

Beyond the academic excellence of our school is the great tradition in oering a broad range of out-of-
class activities whose main focus is to motivate and inspire students to engage in worthwhile pursuits.
This helps them develop their emotional intelligence, transferable skills and ultimately improves their
well-being while making a contribution to the English School community and beyond. Our traditional
areas of engagement such as music, sport, drama, debating, civil action through model United Nations,
the European Youth Parliament and others and volunteer work all made signicant contributions.
Recognising that innovation and entrepreneurship coupled with the useful skills that these develop are
essential to the future success of our graduates, the school supported the introduction and participation
in the Junior Achievement competition, a Robotics Club, the F1 Challenge and the 4x4 in Schools
Technology Challenge -the last two being international science, technology, engineering and maths
(STEM) projects. Our teams produced excellent work which was recognised by the judges at the various
events. For further details, please read on or visit our website!

In today’s fast changing world, every walk of life will be aected by advances in technology and its
application from driverless cars to the way traditional jobs/professions are carried out. Some sources
state that even accountants will no longer be needed within 10 years! Some of the jobs/careers our
students will undertake do not currently exist and due to the rapidly changing work environment they
will need to change career direction a number of times. This makes it even more imperative that students
have the relevant knowledge, transferable skills, positive mind-set and exibility to ride this wave of
change successfully. A recent article I read in New Scientist on Quantum Thermodynamics, a new eld
involving two dicult areas of mathematical/theoretical physics, emphasised this rapidly changing
environment even further. Clearly this new area of science will require very talented and innovative
mathematicians and physicists. The target of this research is to produce more powerful computer
processors since current microchips are reaching their limit due to the heat generated by the circuits
printed on them, which in turn limits the development of advanced articial intelligence. These will be
the sort of challenges our graduates will face as they attend university and the world of work in the
future. We wish them well and hope we have prepared them appropriately to meet these challenges.
In closing, I would like to congratulate and thank all those whose activities and successes are reected
in this magazine and our website. Additionally, I would like to thank Ms Anna Tellalis and her editorial
team for their tireless eorts in putting this magazine together. Finally, my best wishes to you all for a
restful and recuperative summer holiday.

Dr Chris Mavrommatis