Bedford School’s entrepreneur-in-residence wins prestigious award in memory of Princess Diana

Bedford School’s entrepreneur-in-residence, Zubair Junjunia, has been recognised with The Diana Award.

The highest accolade a young person can achieve for social action or humanitarian efforts, the award was established in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, from the charity of the same name - and has the support of her sons, The Duke of Cambridge and The Duke of Sussex.

Zubair’s role at the school has so far included an Entrepreneurial Day, which involved a series of tasks and presentations where boys worked towards a UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target and a Prep School workshop on the art of storytelling.

He was honoured with The Diana Award for going ‘above and beyond to tackle inequalities in education’, with his revision platform, ZNotes.

Founded in 2014, he created ZNotes as a way to share revision notes after recognising that there was a disparity in the access students from around the world had to resources, advice and support when studying for their exams.

He said: “At the age of 16, going into my first set of IGCSE exams, it dawned on me: hundreds of thousands of students across the world will take these exact same exams as me and yet, the access and quality of resources available to each vary so drastically. Some have access to the very best teaching and private tutoring, while others are unable to afford even the basic textbooks.

“So, I did what I could: set up a blog to share the resources I’d created for my own revision. Through word of mouth these high-quality and concise revision notes were being discovered by students globally and ZNotes was born."