Headmaster's Newsletter Friday 23 January 2026
Dear Parents, It is book review season here at NCS: the time when my colleagues and I read books about different aspects of education and discuss those ideas during our INSET sessions. This year we have been reading about recent nationwide education reforms, different approaches to project work, inclusion in education, and new approaches to ASC. I read and reviewed Salmon Khan’s Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) (2025).
Thirty years ago I sat in a classroom which had tape recorders built into the desks. Plugging headsets into these tape recorders, we could apparently learn German at our own pace, learning how to get to the bahnhof bitte in what was trendily called a ‘language lab’. Compared to the technology available to pupils in the mid-2020s, that setup seems laughable. As does, really, the fact that rolling out 1:1 devices to pupils was seen as a game-changer only a decade or so ago. The world of Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising pretty much every aspect of human existence, and education is no exception. It is not a question of ‘if’ AI will change teaching and learning; it is a question of ‘how?’ and ‘how quickly?’. Salman Khan is of the view that change is coming, it is coming very quickly, and it needs to be embraced. As he puts it, ‘The AI tsunami has drawn back from the shore, and it is now barrelling toward us’. There is no point naval-gazing about whether AI is good or bad; we need to work out how we are going to use it, and we need to do so using what he calls ‘educated bravery’.
Khan’s Brave New Words has two purposes. The first is general: to philosophise about the role of AI in education, to sense its dangers and work out some mitigations. The second is more specific: to show infomercial-style how his AI tutoring service, Khanmigo (a spin-off from his long-established Khan Academy), theoretically goes about mitigating those dangers and providing a valuable one-on-one tutoring service, potentially for every student in every corner of the world. Khan’s ambition is to provide world-class learning in this form, allowing individually paced AI tuition to allow all students to ace, to fully master, subjects.
Khan is very good at pre-empting the critiques that have already been made of AI. Doesn’t AI just lead to our brains atrophying as we hand over our thinking skills to a large language model which can get to an answer much quicker than we can? Do our problem-solving skills and critical thinking skills therefore just deteriorate? Yes, if there aren’t guardrails, and if AI is used just to provide answers rather than to coach or tutor students to those answers. So in Khanmigo, for example, you can’t just put in your quadratic equation and expect there to be an answer pumped out at the end. The AI tutor will, in theory, talk you through the steps of how to work through that equation and get to the right answer. AI therefore sits alongside the student, it partners with them, stimulating their curiosity, rather than just telling them the answer. It gives real-time feedback, and is always there when the going gets tough and when motivation starts to wane.
Students therefore learn ‘smarter’, their learning rate increases exponentially, and they use the good bits of AI, with which they will need to be familiar anyway when they enter the workplace. AI becomes a one-on-one tutor, like Aristotle was to Alexander the Great, working through topics at the student’s pace, at their zone of proximal development, so they are neither bored nor over-stretched. They engage in Socratic dialogue so they are, in theory, encouraged to think more deeply. Khan is a little harsh on the classrooms of today, describing them broad-brush-style as ‘traditional fixed-pace classes’ in which students are forced to ‘move on to a more advanced topic even if they haven’t mastered more basic ones’. He calls this ‘lock-step’ teaching, which leads to gaps building and compounding over time. I don’t know how many classrooms Khan has been in recently, but I can’t say I have experienced much ‘lock-step’ teaching in the last twenty years or so, and good schools already work to counter it.
I don’t want to take up all of your Friday evenings, so next week I’ll let you know what Khan says about screentime, socialisation, cheating, creativity, and the impact on the teaching profession!
Have a great weekend,
Matt Jenkinson
Congratulations to all those boys who took part in our Music Scholars’ Recital in The New Space on Wednesday evening. These events are always special, as our Year 8s put in their final practice for their upcoming auditions, but Wednesday’s performances were of especially high quality. We wish all the boys well as they head to their secondary schools over the coming weeks!
We are very much looking forward to the NCSPA Quiz Night on Friday 30 January at 19.00 (questions start promptly at 19.30). The evening includes question rounds set by the SLT and a curry meal with vegetarian options from 19.00; there is also a cost-price bar. Entry is by sign-up only, via https://tinyurl.com/232s2xdb. There is also the option for (cheap!) childcare, staffed by NCS teachers, in the auditorium. Advance sign-up for this is required at https://square.link/u/5GxqQDJw. The Quiz Night always proves to be one of the best nights of the year in the school calendar. In previous quizzes, teams (of up to 10) have grouped themselves by year group, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule. There is also, traditionally, a Year 8 pupil team, for whom the cost is significantly reduced and tickets for these boys are available at https://square.link/u/ArmWjUtn. The deadline for signing up is Monday 26 January, to enable good time for the NCSPA to put in the food order.
National Year of Reading: With the weather as bleak as it is, we all need a good laugh. Our years of experience have also shown us that this is the time of year when good reading habits may begin to fade away. As solutions to both of these problems, Chris Gausden would like to recommend to Years 7 and 8 books by Nathanael Lessore. Lessore's books are both hilarious and heartwarming. They also manage to address important issues relevant to boys at the upper end of our school without ever coming across as lecturing or cringe-inducing. Steady For This is a hilarious exploration of what happens when a student Shaun (aka MC Growls) goes viral for the wrong reasons. King of Nothing (which won the Waterstones Prize last year) explores an unexpected friendship between two pupils and should have readers reflecting on what really matters at school.
Speaking of reading … NCS parents may be interested in a new novel, Ultramarine, written by Paul Drayton. It is described as ‘a tale of ambition, creativity and deception’ set in fourteenth-century England. Why am I plugging it here? The fourteenth-century bit might be a clue. Paul was Director of Music here at NCS in the 1960s and he has clearly been inspired by the school’s earliest pupils. Paul was also the composer of the music for ‘The NCS Hobbit’, performed in 1967. This was the first time that Tolkien had given permission for the book to be staged, and he was in the audience to see it performed. The theatre in which the play took place was demolished a few years ago to make way for our new Gradel buildings, but there is a plaque in our new auditorium to commemorate the event. The play was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary in 2012.
A plea for parents to ensure that boys’ uniform items have name labels in – ideally the name corresponding to their son! It is great that we have a healthy culture of using second-hand uniform, but quite often the name labels in those items correspond to pupils who have long left (donating their uniform as they went) and may very well have families and children of their own by now.
Sport roundup: Despite the best efforts of the frost and rain, we have made another excellent start to the hockey season. In our traditional season opener against Abingdon, we always expect a tough game, and this season was no exception. The senior NCS teams battled and performed brilliantly on their way to some really encouraging results. The win remained elusive to us on the opening day of the season, but credible draws and very close games in defeat meant that players and coaches alike came away from the pitch full of anticipation for the season ahead. Year 4 have also already had their first game, and they continued where they left off at the end of the Year 3 season: brilliant effort and great teamwork as they enjoyed three cracking games away at MCS. A very promising start to the season, with both schools taking the spoils in many short and frenetic games.
The U13 teams were in action again on Monday, when we entertained d’Overbroeck’s. The class and composure of the NCS hockey teams meant we kept the ball and passed our way to goal on numerous occasions. The overall results were two comprehensive wins for NCS, and from that we moved on with confidence to four fixtures with Summer Fields on Wednesday afternoon. As we got to the hockey pitches, we were met with yet another wet and cold afternoon, but this was far removed from the red-hot hockey the NCS teams were about to play. Within eight minutes, the 1st team were three goals to the good and looking composed and confident as they stroked the ball around the pitch to carve open shooting chances for the forwards. The same was true on the 2nd team pitch, as Steve Potts’ team were looking dangerous and deadly in front of goal, resulting in a final score of 6–1. On the C team pitch, I had the pleasure of umpiring a hard and free-flowing game where both teams had chances to score. Early in the second half NCS took the lead thanks to a well-worked goal that saw the boys pass out from the back and move the ball forwards with calm and deliberate play. A final score of 2–1 to NCS was just reward for the boys’ amazing effort. The final game of the afternoon was a fantastic 1–1 draw in the D team encounter. Again, there was end-to-end action, with both goalkeepers earning their money to ensure honours were even at the end of the day.
Finally this week, we need to mention the amazing exploits of the U13 1st team. On Friday last week, they attended the annual hockey County Cup up at Oxford Hawks Hockey Club. Following last year’s brilliant runners-up position, the boys knew they had a lot to live up to. After a tough round of group games that included two wins and two defeats, the boys found themselves in the play-offs on goal difference. Next up were The Dragon in the semi-finals and, after another really tough game that ended in a draw, the boys were faced with a penalty shoot-out. After a tense and thrilling few minutes, the NCS team emerged the winners. So, the boys found themselves in the final against MCS. The pressure was on! Confidence flooded through the team, and what followed was simply amazing. NCS took the lead after five minutes and played some breath-taking hockey in doing so. In the dying seconds MCS scored to level the game, and again the boys faced a penalty shoot-out to decide things. After three penalties each, the teams could not be split and so it went to sudden death. On this occasion, NCS kept their cool and slotted home the winning penalty to earn themselves the title of County Champions! This is an impressive achievement for this wonderful group of boys, and we wish them well for the South-Central regional finals in March.
Upcoming Events
Monday 26 January 2026 14.30 U12 A Hockey County Cup, North Oxford 17.30 NCSPA Meeting (CLC) Wednesday 28 January 2026 9.00 Chapel. Speaker: Dr Sarah Squire, Head of Cokethorpe 14.15 U13 A&B Hockey v Hatherop Castle, St Edward's 12.10 Year 4 Trip to Ashmolean (returns 14.30) 18.00 Year 4 parents' evening Friday 30 January 2026 7.30 U12 A IAPS Hockey, St Edward's (return 16.00) 19.00 NCSPA Quiz and Curry Night -- sign-up only (Sports Hall; food from 19.00; rounds begin at 19.30) Monday 02 February 2026 14.30 U13 C&D Hockey v Bloxham, St Edward's Tuesday 03 February 2026 14.00 U8&9 Hockey v Chandlings, Iffley Road Wednesday 04 February 2026 9.00 Chapel. Speaker: Mr Tony Morris, publisher and author of 'What Do Buddhists Believe?' 13.30 Interschools Debate, New College (ends 16.00) 14.00 U11 A-D Hockey v Chandlings, Away 14.00 U13 Hockey House Matches, St Edward's 19.30 Year 6 ballet trip: Swan Lake (New Theatre, Oxford)