Head's Newsletter 13 December 2019

SENIOR TEAM MATHS CHALLENGE There has been much success by students within the last month! On November 6 th , four students pictured right: Christian Cases (Yr12), Arnav Jadhav (Yr12), Jack Yu (Yr11) and Ojas Gulati (Yr10) represented the school in the SW Regional Final of the UKMT Senior Team Maths Challenge (intended for Sixth Formers). These students were selected after an intensive try-out process for which over 30 students in the school took part. The competition consists of three rounds: a Group Round, involving 10 difficult questions the team work on together, a ‘cross number’ round (think crossword clues but with numbers), and the dreaded ‘Relay’ round, where the answer to one question feeds into the next. After two of these rounds, Tiffin were level pegging on full marks with Kings College Wimbledon. But our team’s prowess and experience shone through on the last round, where we again achieved full marks bar a single lost time bonus, achieving an amazing score of 178/180 vs King’s 168/180 (who finished in second place). We will once again be taking part in the National Final in central London in February. Congratulations to the boys! SENIOR MATHS CHALLENGE On November 7 th , 127 Sixth Form students (and younger) took part in the Senior Maths Challenge. This is a challenging paper, taken by hundreds of thousands of

students across the UK, consisting of 25 multiple choice questions of increasing difficulty. We are delighted at the record results, with 11 students qualifying for the extremely prestigious British Maths Olympiad, reserved for only the top 1000 students nationally. Congratulations to the Year 13s (Ollie Coppelotti, Haotian Wu, Gus Goodman and Saomiyan Mathetharan), Year 12s (Christian Cases, Gianluca Maffi, Arnav Jadhav) and the Year 10s (Nathaniel Johnson, Ojas Gulati, Arlo McKillop) who achieved this accolade. A further 40 students achieved a Gold certificate (top 10% of entrants nationally), with special mention to Kai Jewson and Lucas Bowman, who are only in Year 9. The Olympiad will take place on 29th November and consists of a 3.5-hour exam consisting of just six incredibly challenging questions. A further 29 students have qualified for the Senior Kangaroo follow on round. We wish these students the best of luck.