Sports Day was a real treat this year. We started with the Pre-Prep races at Noon. It is clear that the competitive urge begins early in life as I have rarely seen such intense determination. The only place where this was more obvious was the parent race afterwards where clearly the mothers and fathers wished to impress their offspring! The Prep Sports Day was a fiesta of competition and right up until the moment that Madame Loyer, in this case in her role as mother of the Head Boy, gave out the cups, everyone was doing everything to ensure that their house won. There can be no finer place to watch sport than Merton Field. It was a very happy day indeed.

This week has been an immensely studious few days in that all the Prep School have been doing exams. The Form Eights have been doing their Common Entrance, the final exam of their time at school - all boys at our School still do this exam even if very many senior schools no longer require it, though some still do, we feel strongly that practice of exams is an immensely important skill that we ought to be teaching our pupils. My firm belief, having spent most of my career in senior schools, is that those people who arrive at senior school knowing how to take exams tend to do much better in them at GCSE at a level. We all know that exams are not the be all and end all of education - very far from it, but it is important to have ways of testing people and of gauging how well they are performing.