As I opened the gate, the first two boys to enter the building rushed past me talking excitedly. Already the choristers had taken the building over, and Music was sounding around the corridors. The building had sprung to life again, a place that, during the course of the summer, had become a collection of rather empty corridors. The school is never itself until the pupils arrive.

One of the first things I told the pupils was that a number of classrooms had been renamed. All of
this stems from the fact that we have our new library. We have named the library after the well-known Early 20th century detective writer Dorothy L Sayers, who was born in the school as her father
was the Headmaster in the 1890s.

The room in which the library is now housed used to be the old changing room. Since Covid we have
no longer been using it and so it has been reborn as a library. Over the course of the term it will
develop further and I can’t wait to see the emergence of a wonderful mural which will be very kindly
painted by a remarkably talented parent. It will show a number of Oxford literary characters.
The books are now in place and there is also a pile of beanbags into which pupils will insert
themselves in order to travel into the glorious fictional world contained between the covers of the
many books in the room.

During my first assembly with the pupils, I held up my iPhone and asked the pupils what the object
in my hand was. Unsurprisingly, it was quickly identified as a phone, but just as rapidly the pupils
started to make suggestions as to its other functions. They mentioned that I could use it as a
camera, that I could find my way around the country (and indeed the world) by using it, that I could
play music with it and that I could use it as a torch - indeed, one young man went as far as to
suggest that I could use it to play games. I told him that I did not do such a thing! Remarkably, I
pointed out that it gave me access to more knowledge than was contained in the world’s greatest
library and to artificial intelligence which could scour this archive and summarise it almost
instantaneously. I reminded the pupils just what a miracle this tiny object was and how
extraordinary were its powers. But I did say that I believed it should be our tool and not our master,
that we had to retain power over it rather than to allow it to control us.

One of the ways that we would achieve this is to ensure that at CCCS we continue to teach people to
think and to calculate and to navigate, to know things and to think logically. These things I can
assure you we will continue to do in order that our pupils are able to make use of the extraordinary
power that AI brings without losing the ability to be fully human.

I’ve had a lovely day today. It was glorious to be back in the Cathedral, particularly given how many
parents attended, and coffee afterwards was a delightful and lively gathering. It was so nice to see
how happy all the new pupils seemed to be – one of the new Reception pupils had told his mother
that he had made a new best friend – “Mr Berry!” I thoroughly enjoyed my philosophy enrichment
where we got into an animated discussion about the morality of different social systems, though my
group was dwarfed by many of the other groups, especially by the large number of people signing
up for card games and for cross country running! I also visited the DT room where the pupils were
given the task of refashioning a set of the most old-fashioned desks which had been removed from
one of the classrooms – it will be interesting to see what use the pupils put them to. Meanwhile in
the Form 3 classroom, I arrived only to find that the pupils were covered in bandages, a result of their
being present in a French lesson where they had to learn the words for various catastrophic looking
injuries, many of them to the head. I sincerely hope that these pupils will return to school on Monday
otherwise we could be a class down. Despite this setback, it’s been a glorious start to the year!