In Conversation with Simon James Green

Hattie Filmore

Simon James Green, author of Noah Can’t Even, Gay Club!, and Boy Like Me, grew up in Lincolnshire under section 28, a reviled law that prohibited “promoting homosexuality” by teaching or publishing materials. After his witty, inspiring talk to students from QEGS, Banovallum, and KEVIGS on April 27th , I was able to catch him for a few questions.

HF: To what extent did growing up under section 28 instil a sense of duty in you, to write the stories that were censored out of your own youth?

SJG: It made me want to write books that had LGBTQ+ characters in the lead and made me want to write the sort of book that I would have loved to have found in the school library when I was younger but didn’t see because of section 28. So basically, everything I write has been inspired by that censorship of section 28.

HF: Growing up under such censorship, where else did you turn to for role models of LGBTQ+ figures?

SJG: Well, this is the problem. There was barely anyone. Occasionally you might see an LGBTQ+ character on television, or there were a few LGBT celebrities like Freddy Mercury, but he died from AIDS in 1991. So, it did leave loads of us at that time feeling very isolated and quite afraid. And when you have young people feeling like that, it has repercussions years and years later. That’s why it’s important we never go back to a time where anyone feels like they’re not represented.

HF: Do you feel that aspects of that censorship have remained in the school system?

SJG: I think things like section 28 have a legacy; just because it was repealed in 2003 doesn’t mean that its ripples haven’t carried on for years afterwards. You still had teachers who thought you couldn’t really talk about it. Crucially, you have parents now who were themselves at school during section 28 who still think that any discussion of being LGBTQ+ is inappropriate, because that’s what they were taught. The problem is that that kind of hate and bigotry has a really dangerous way of trickling down through the years. And so, when you hear today about people who want to ban LGBTQ+ books from libraries, part of it is because they were taught it’s wrong when they were at school.

HF: Do you actively set out to write books with happy endings because you feel young, gay people have been denied this hope and support for so long?

SJG: It’s partly a response to, when I started writing, so many of the books out there being tragic. So often by the end of a fiction book, the gay characters have died or been victim of a homophobic attack. I wanted to put a different message out there: while this stuff does happen, sadly, and we shouldn’t dismiss it, it’s not the only story. It’s very important to realise that happiness is as much a part of being LGBTQ+ as being straight. I think that my books definitely do have hopeful endings. And most of them are happy as well. I think the joy aspect of it was really important for me. I didn’t want to be preaching misery and doom because that’s not really been my experience.

HF: Do you think that more adults should read YA books? Are these lessons just as valuable later in life?

SJG: I totally think they should. First of all, I think YA books are often brilliant. But also, they allow adults to relive their teenage years. Chances are, an LGBTQ+ adult today couldn’t be out when they were at school. Encountering these stories later in life allows you vicariously to live those moments and to imagine what it could have been like had the world been different. I think that’s a really important thing, and it’s part of the healing process if you’ve been through some kind of trauma. I hear from readers who are everything from 10 to 80 and to be reaching such a wide audience is a really wonderful thing.

In conversation with... The Librarians

Jessica Dodwell

The library is, in my opinion, undoubtedly one of the linchpins of the school and students’ success. From year seven library lessons to sixth form private study periods, it fulfils a range of requirements that span the entire spectrum of year groups. And it’s the librarians, Mrs Simons and Mrs Samra, who keep it all running smoothly behind the scenes. Although familiar faces to all of us, the complexity of their roles remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. So I recently sat down with Mrs Samra to ask her about what being a librarian at QEGS entails. The list, it turns out, is far too long to cram into this article, but it includes book ordering, prep, cataloguing, creating displays, invoices, reading lists and running library assistant interviews and book clubs. My next question aimed to break down the different ways in which the librarians engage students with reading. This is a particularly important aspect of what the library does, given the current national trend in reading rates.

In 2019, just 26% of under-18s spent some time each day reading, according to the

National Literacy Trust. To combat this, Mrs Samra told me about a new approach that she trialled within the library lessons of Mrs Waters’ year eight and nine classes.

Note that the takeaways and key messages that she outlined to me are actionable techniques that we can all implement within our own lives to revive (or sustain) a love of reading…

Across a number of sessions, students were given a talk on how to make a ‘meaningful choice’ with their reading materials (including checking for readability, considering their desired genre and reading experience) and then gave presentations themselves on a book they had chosen according to these criteria.

However, Mrs Samra noticed that students still felt hindered by common barriers to reading. These included time, choice and remembering their book (whether for school, a long car journey etc.).

She described an exercise to me that she did with the English groups which I think we could all benefit from. In this (modified) version, I’d like you to hold up four fingers and put one down each time your answer to a question is ‘yes’:

• Have you read a website / article / blog post in the last month?

• Have you spent over ten minutes on social media today?

• Did you choose what you had for breakfast?

• Do you remember to bring your phone to school?

If your fingers are down, then we’ve just established that you are a reader, you do have time, you do have choice, and you are capable of remembering to bring things with you. Essentially, there’s often no good reason why you can’t start, and continue, a reading habit.

In a following session, students were reminded of the benefits of reading for pleasure. These included increased empathy, improved sleep, reduced stress and improved chances of obtaining top GCSE grades.

To put into action everything they’d learned, Mrs Samra asked students to consider drawing up personalised reading targets, according to:

• When they would read e.g. before school, lunchtimes, evening

• Length of time they would read for e.g. ten minutes per day, twenty pages

• Frequency of reading sessions e.g. every day, three times a week

• Routine of reading e.g. rigid or flexible timetable?

• Prompts to remind them to read e.g. setting an alarm

Refreshing your approach to reading, and making sure you keep finding time for it, is a crucial step to sustaining a reading habit. It might be worth, having read this article, thinking about how you could put into place some realistic reading targets for yourself.

Finally, I asked Mrs Samra for a book recommendation. She was reluctant to give a onesize-fits-all response, as everyone who reads this will be of different ages and reading tastes, but she did admit that one of her favourite books of all time was Lark by Anthony McGowan because it’s

Nineteen Eighty-Four in Twenty-Twenty-Three

Jessica Dodwell

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has had an undeniable impact on British culture and political thinking, as well as a pervasive influence on global politics and kitchen-table philosophers everywhere. In fact, the novel is so esteemed in our society as a pillar of intellect that 42% of people who participated in a survey by the Guardian reported that they had falsely claimed to have read it. So, we know that lots of people say they’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four but what happens when you actually have? How compatible is Orwell’s dystopia with our reality?

Well, it’s unlikely that Orwell could have predicted that his dark vision would give its name to a television show where ordinary people voluntarily subject themselves to constant surveillance. But the existence of Channel 5’s Big Brother is perhaps indicative of the accuracy of Orwell’s insight. The format of the show utilises CCTV and microphone wires to observe its participants, and the producers control their activity — even their longevity — within the program. Sounds suspiciously like a telescreen to me.

Although it could be argued that small social experiments such as this one aren’t reflective of wider society, there isn’t the social outcry that one might expect from a democracy that completely repudiates state intrusion into the domestic sphere. We might not be living in an autocracy, but we tacitly condone one every time we sit down with a cup of tea to watch programs like Big Brother

The book seems to carry a special resonance today, when modern society is so inextricably entwined with social media — a watchful, and somewhat sinister, gaze comparable to the likes of the Thought Police. And it isn’t just social media apps that plumb the depths of our online presence for information about ourselves, websites now use the horrifyingly misappropriated term ‘cookies’ (seriously. Don’t offer me a baked good and give me a HTTP text file instead) to poke around our search history. Whilst some of us are still amazed at the intuition of the shopping gods when an advert for the sweater we’ve just been looking at pops up, most are disillusioned to the nature of internet usage in the modern world. In a way, we’re all Proles slaves to the Inner Party of capitalism and the endless mill race of materialism.

What’s perhaps even more terrifying is the recent inception and rapid dissemination of fake news. The fact is that the truth is now malleable and, perhaps, subjective. Whilst people used to receive their news from (mostly) fact-checked and trusted sites, the rise of social media has facilitated the divestment of journalistic power from the journalists to the ordinary internet user. Anyone can post about anything no check required. Think how Donald Trump’s presidential campaign so successfully manipulated universally acknowledged truths (such as the 2021 election result) to carve out space for falsehoods. Not only this, but people believed them. They even stormed the capital in the name of 'alternative facts' (Kellyanne Conway’s words, not mine). When we start thinking in these terms, we’re one step closer to the world of Thought Crime and the Ministry of Truth that Winston inhabits in the book.

So, whilst Nineteen Eighty-Four’s manifesto for the modern world might be easily dismissed upon first reading, it's clear that Orwell was nearer the mark than we might feel comfortable acknowledging.

How Games Have Revolutionised the Field of AI

Anuhya Thota

Lee Sedol, one of the world's top Go players, stared at the board in disbelief. A series of strategic moves executed with remarkable precision had cornered him into surrender. But his adversary wasn't a fellow human; it was AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google's DeepMind. Go is an ancient board game (see above) that has challenged mankind for centuries and so AI beating humans in the game of Go was believed to be decades away. This was one of the defining moments that underlined the powerful impact games have had on the development of Artificial Intelligence. Now, games have evolved into high stake proving grounds that push the boundaries of what AI can achieve. One of the earliest examples of this is in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue, a machine learning model, defeated the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. This event was one of the first to prove that AI systems could make strategic decisions that even surpassed the level of human experts. Another leap was made in 2011 when IBM's Watson won a game of Jeopardy against the show's greatest champions, showcasing AI's burgeoning abilities in understanding natural language, puns, and riddles.

Clearly, the triumph of AI in games did not happen overnight but rather unfolded as a journey of successive breakthroughs. Each victory, each loss, each surprising move that an AI made during a game became a learning moment, allowing for the refinement of underlying AI algorithms. For instance, Deep Blue's success in chess gave us the first taste of how a machine could strategize. It marked the advancement of tree search algorithms, showcasing how an AI could evaluate potential sequences of moves and choose the most promising ones.

Next came more complex games such as Go and Poker, each presenting a fresh set of challenges and requiring AI to not only compute possible outcomes but to deal with uncertainty, bluffing, and more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. This was where reinforcement learning came to the fore. AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol wasn't merely a game won; it was a testament to the power of combining deep learning with reinforcement learning, birthing a new paradigm in AI: deep reinforcement learning. It opened up possibilities for AI to learn directly from raw inputs, make long-term strategic decisions, and adapt its strategies based on new information.

As AIs ventured into the realm of multiplayer video games, they faced new dimensions of complexity, leading to the evolution of multiagent systems and improved adversarial training techniques. These games required AI to operate in dynamic environments, coordinate with or compete against multiple players, and respond to unpredictable strategies, thus expanding the boundaries of AI capabilities.

These algorithms have found applications across various sectors outside of games. Autonomous vehicles use these techniques to understand their environment and make quick decisions. In healthcare, similar algorithms analyse medical images or genomic data to detect diseases. Similarly, finance, supply chain management, natural language processing, energy management, and cybersecurity have also all benefited from these advancements.

As teenagers with ADHD, allowing our thoughts to wander off into spaces oozing with creative ideas, and sometimes completely random thoughts, definitely doesn't come as a struggle. To some people this seems like an unimaginable superpower. Endless suggestions on how to write your next history essay exploding out of your brain seems amazing. You will never fail again! Right? Right! However, when our imagination flows one step too far into the magical abyss our brains hold, our thoughts can become pretty overwhelming, causing a spiral into the future. Impending doom hovers over everything leading to a turbulent whizz of what might happen. Affecting what we think we can achieve in the future in a rather fatalistic way.

More often than not, it is thought that ADHD traits can make many different professions difficult. How can you be a lawyer if you can sit still for less time than a toddler? It isn’t difficult to cross out potential career options for people with ADHD when only engaging with the ‘negative’ traits of the condition. But why feed into the stigma surrounding ADHD and failure, when gleamingly amazing characteristics could be highlighted instead, in profession fields such as healthcare?

Symptoms of our ADHD do not always have to leave us at a gritty stumbling block - on the contrary, they can work in our favour! For example, we can work incredibly well when under pressure.

Why ADHD is a Superpower in Healthcare Jobs

Connie Maguire-Furness, 9Q

Additionally, we have the considerable strength of being able to quickly think on the spot then act on the plan without hesitation in distressing situations (something a large amount of people are unable to do!). These abilities, though just two examples, make many of us a perfect fit for healthcare jobs. Think of nurses, paramedics, ICM doctors. They are never presented with a repetitive task and each day holds a new situation. In agreement with the ADHD need to be constantly buzzing around, these jobs never include being consistently sat perched at a desk to aimlessly respond to emails, but almost always involve movement from one place to another as well as interactions with patients. We know that the more movement that occurs whilst performing cognitive tasks, the better off we are. The environments in which healthcare professionals work in seem as though they were naturally moulded to suit ADHD. Surely this can only promote success and achievement.

In addition, working in an intense space such as A&E or a mental health unit requires skills similar to those of working in a paramedic. Fast thinking with quick actions is an enormous benefit and it just so happens that our ADHD brains have that permanently structured in. Also, our hyper focus, as well as the strengthening ability to work under pressure, means that environments such as this only broaden work options. The extensively long shifts healthcare professionals work can be handled expertly by ADHD bodies and brains, due to underlying neurological differences which cause rapid thoughts. At first, this symptom of ADHD is presumed unfavourable in terms of how we function, which at times it is, but if we look at the recognized component of restlessness in a different manner then maybe it would be viewed in a valuable way. Intensive care staff are involved in persistent hustle and bustle, continually needing to carry out different tasks one after another. The pace in which they work mirrors the pace of the thoughts of those with ADHD. Therefore meaning, lively environments (which there are in abundance in healthcare fields) are well suited to us ADHDer’s.

Distant from the hyperactivity and constant need for movement, another side of ADHD lies. Empathy. Due to the battles we face every day, many of us feel large waves of sympathy for those who are struggling despite not having to face some of the challenges others do. Although lots of healthcare jobs require the ability to empathize, it is arguable that midwifery requires this field of strength the most. No two births are the same and each labour and delivery experience is largely unique, each one takes a plenitude of care. Even with no experience as a parent, we understand the fiery whirlwind of emotions that occur in labour and delivery rooms. And with the ability to remain calm in pressured situations as well as being able to feel and understand emotions, midwifery appears to be an ideal job for people who have ADHD. The empathetic aspect of ADHD is a remarkable trait that can help new parents who are on an emotional roller coaster and being able to empathize with someone naturally, radiates a calm presence thus making a significant difference to how a labouring mother feels, particularly in such an enormous turning point in her life. Both skills make a compassionate midwife meaning we who have ADHD would make an excellent fit for this profession.

ADHD is so much more than what we perceive it to be. Of course, not everyone who lives with it will grow up to blossom into the next Virginia-Apgar-esque prodigy (though it is not to be said this isn’t a possibility). However, it is incredibly crucial to understand that ADHD is not a weakness and there are countless careers that we can pursue with great fulfilment, specifically in the healthcare field.

Should Euthanasia be Legal in the UK?

Izzy Marritt

In the UK, active suicide and the use of lethal injection is punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment due the Suicide Act (1961); however, passive euthanasia, such as refusing life-sustaining treatment, is legal. The Tony Bland case of 1989, where the family members of Tony Bland petitioned for his hydration and nutrition to be cut off, causing him to die, has allowed omissions (failure to act) is not illegal under the Suicide Act. There have been many attempts to overturn the law, but to no success. Should euthanasia be legal in the UK?

Organisations like Dying with Dignity are campaigning for the right to a ‘good death’ and making changes in the UK laws. The concept of euthanasia is a difficult topic to discuss. Death has always been something uncomfortable and hard to talk about, and I think for some people the idea of euthanasia, and choosing when you can die, seems incomprehensible. Is it more autonomous to let someone die painlessly, and when they choose, rather than letting them suffer? Diane Pretty had motor neurones disease and wanted to avoid an extremely painful death, however, her appeal to the UK courts was unsuccessful and she died in a hospice in 2002. A terminal illness like motor neurones disease tarnishes someone’s quality of life, and the use of euthanasia would allow a person to choose when to end their suffering and cut short the pain they would have to endure.

Although there are some definite benefits of euthanasia, one could argue that in allowing the law to pass, the death rate would go up massively and people would be turning to euthanasia without looking at other options and making an uninformed decision. How could you control the use of euthanasia, and make sure it isn’t used irresponsibly, without taking away someone’s right to die? The issue of whether those with mental health issues could resort to euthanasia is a big debate, as it is so subjective and changeable, and mental health can be argued to be ‘aidable’, which although is a big assumption to make, it does raise the question about how illness is so subjective, and the act of euthanasia is such a large, difficult decision to make.

Euthanasia is a topic that is impossible to truly understand, as it encompasses so many issues and debates, and there are many questions which are difficult to answer, as the right to die is something one cannot easily apply to one’s own life.

How Do Different Countries Elect their Leaders?

Chloe Ward

Different countries all across the world elect their governments in all types of ways. Ninety percent of the world votes at 18. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country to grant women the right to vote. By the 1950s, two-thirds of countries around the world had adopted universal suffrage, which meant all adult citizens had equal rights to vote.

Poland

Polish democracy was reborn in 1989 after the fall of communism across Eastern Europe. A candidate will win if they attain at least 50% of the popular vote. If no candidate gets at least 50%, a second round will pit the two top contenders against each other only. There are questions around the success of this method since there has only been one firstround winner, after the re-election in 2000 of Alexander Kwasniewski, who was a former communist who had since transformed himself into a pro-democracy figure. Poland's first postcommunist president, Lech Walesa, still needed a second-round vote for his run.

South Africa

South Africa’s first all-race elections were held in 1994. Citizens vote for political parties rather than individual candidates. The president will then be chosen by a vote held by the National Assembly. The African National Congress, which is the liberation movement now turned political party, has dominated politics ever since Nelson Mandela became president in 1994.

Brazil

The age at which a person can vote in Brazil is younger than in the UK: it is only 16. Additionally, voting is COMPULSORY in Brazil, meaning elections have quite a high voter turnout. Brazil will choose its president through a direct election. This is held in two rounds, unless the first-round winner achieves more than 50% of the votes.

Japan

Japan's governmental framework was established in 1947. It is a unitary state that contains 47 administrative divisions. The Emperor will be its Head of State; however, his role is ceremonial, and he has no powers related to the government. The current emperor of Japan is His Majesty Emperor Naruhito and has been since 2019, ever since his father Akihito abdicated the throne. The National Diet, compiled of two houses (the House of Representatives and the House of Councilors), is the highest state power in Japan. The House of Representatives is composed of 480 members, of whom 300 are elected through constituencies. An office term is 4 years, but can be terminated if the House is dissolved.

Belarus’ government is split into three branches to prevent all governmental power from going into the hands of one particular government body. It is split into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The prime minister is appointed by the president. The prime minister is the nominal head of government, but power is concentrated in the President both in fact and law.

Year 7 was introduced to colour and tone, learning about shadows, as displayed in the pencil tone sketch by Year 7 Harriette Smith-Lindsey. It displays a sketch of an eye, that individuals learn in Year 8. However, studies of the eye is a popular area in art that budding artists are often drawn to, myself included.