Mr. Chris Muller

FROM SIR WILLIAM PERKINS’S SCHOOL, SURREY

Mr. Chris Muller speaks about their ethos, school motto, their socially and ethnically diverse community, welcoming AI into the curriculum and the benefits to staff and pupils of being forward thinking as a school.

To begin with, could you tell us a little about Sir William Perkins’s School?

Sir William Perkins’s School is situated in Chertsey, we’re an 1118, all-girls’, academically selective school and we currently have around 600 students.

Do you have a school motto? Can you explain the significance of this to your school’s community?

Our school motto, like most school mottos, is in Latin: “A Spe in Spem”, which means ‘from hope to hope’. Parents and students have asked what it actually means, and how I’ve interpreted it is that it’s saying to look at the future with hope, with expectation, with optimism. After all, the alternative is a pretty bleak affair. So, our students are filled with hope and optimism and are justifiably ambitious for the future as well.

What are your scholarship and bursary programmes?

We have Academic, Sport, Music, Drama and Art scholarships in Year 7, and again at the beginning of the Sixth Form. The academic one is an interview of those who have come top in the entrance exam. Sport, Music, Drama and Art are all done either through a portfolio, performance or some sort of sporting demonstration.

What does your school do to support children from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds?

We’re very lucky at this school – we’re a former old grammar school and we had that ethos still there. To put it into context, we have a very socially and ethnically diverse community. Half the students who join us in Year 7 will come from the state sector, half from the independent sector, so that really enables the teachers and the community to feel that we’re very nicely linked to our local community.

We have a generous bursary scheme, which enables and provides support for those parents and students who we know would really benefit from the education here, and also provides support for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Our students are also engaged in the community at large, which we feel is hugely important. For example, just this week our Year 9s are going into a local primary school to talk to the Year 5s in Spanish. Similarly, our Sixth Form students go into local charities to work and support them. Many of our staff are involved in local schools, whether that’s in terms of supporting them or as governors – we’re very keen to support governorship amongst our staff to primary and secondary schools. We’re very much part of our local community.

We recently attended a conference on AI at Cottesmore School, in which speakers discussed the strengths and weaknesses of AI and how it could be used in the classroom through tools such as ChatGPT. How is your school preparing its students for the digital age?

It is going to be a digital age. We’ve talked about careers, and it is used in every profession and will continue to be used even more, so we can’t run away from it or hope to close everything down and pretend that students can’t access it. We have a digital strategy: all our students have iPads, which expand the learning opportunities for them. We don’t see the iPad as the be-all and end-all, it’s a tool in their educational toolbox that they can bring out and use. It enables them to do a range of different things; for example, they can use spreadsheets to input data from experiments, they can share pieces of work when doing collaborative working, they can throw up their answers on the screen in class, it enables lots of things and broadens opportunities for learning. After all, we are preparing them for life. It looks like 40% of jobs currently being done may well not exist by the time many of my students go into the workplace, so it is really important for us to keep our eye on what is happening and make sure they’re fully prepared, in terms of the digital learning they’re receiving, for their eventual entry into the world of work.

Do you have any concerns about the use of technology and AI in the classroom?

I’m a classicist by background, and I’m reminded of a wonderful story from 2,500 years ago where the philosopher Socrates was lamenting about a new form of technology which he thought would destroy the world – that was people writing things down. His argument was that if you wrote things down, you wouldn’t remember and your memory would become weak. This was a great fear for him. In some ways, what I’m implying is that we’ve been here before in a way, you can look through history and see that every new piece of technology causes this existential angst about what is going to happen: “Where will the jobs come from?” That’s a very common refrain throughout history, what happens if we mechanicalize, the industrial revolution did exactly that. The word ‘saboteur’ comes from people throwing sabots into mechanical machines to prevent progress. The question, I think, that people are asking is whether AI is a different level of change, whether it will change so much that we can’t control it or don’t understand it, and I think that’s where some of the fear is coming from.

There’s always a worry about how to deal with new technology in schools, and we’ve been here before with mobile phones. What we have to do, as we have done with mobile phones, is educate students about how to use these things appropriately and respectfully, because they’re not going away. They will use their mobile phones in the world of work, as we all do. What we need, therefore, is to make sure that we’ve taught our students how to be safe online, how to use this technology sensibly, so that they’re comfortable and safe using it going forward. It is an opportunity, AI - of course it is - I suppose the most extraordinary thing is the speed of change, and that’s very disconcerting. You may have read that some of the concern is surrounding things like homework: if things can be produced by ChatGPT, where is the sense in which this is somebody’s work? What about cheating, and using the computers to do your homework and do your exams for you? These are things that we’re going to have to think hard about, and I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but there will be questions and discussions that we’re going to have to think really hard about, in terms of what education will look like in the coming years, and what it will be for – what are we actually doing in education in the next five, ten years? Perhaps ChatGPT will be the driving force behind us making a real change to education.

Further to this, speakers mentioned how schools are currently designed to prepare students for the 20th Century in 2023. Do you feel that the current education system is slightly outdated?

That’s a really difficult question. It’s interesting that we say that the system was devised in the 19th Century and I suspect that if I were to bring someone from 1883, they would still see rows of classrooms, they would have a teacher and a blackboard, perhaps, but the essence isn’t that different. I don’t think our time traveller from 1883 would necessarily be completely ill at ease with what they’re seeing in the classroom - I think it would be familiar to them. The question is, is it going to be fit for purpose as things develop?

One of the things that did happen after the pandemic that really interested me, once we had all been online, was that teachers’ and students’ comfort levels with things like Zoom went through the roof. Prior to the pandemic, we wouldn’t have been as comfortable – we knew it did happen, but we probably wouldn’t have gone on and done this. Necessity, being the mother of invention as it is, drove us to work like this, and we suddenly found out that this is really quite convenient. So, we are seeing lots of changes in that way. A good example is parent evenings – we see many parents online now, which means we have a much better take-up, parents can access teachers more easily from their home rather than coming into school, which they may not have the time to do. AI may well be another one of these driving forces in education which forces us to think really hard about what we want to do and what education is about.

However, the one thing the pandemic taught us is that the human element is essential. We can talk about AI as much as we want, but human intelligence, human interaction, the sense of being physically together, is crucial. I think that’s something which, whatever the education system of 2050 looks like, will have to be retained. It might well be the case that we’re looking more at mentors and coaches rather than teachers, but the human element of the interaction will have to remain the same. www.swps.org.uk

And computers can make mistakes. That’s right, and so can humans. I mean, the argument is that humans might make more mistakes.

How do you think the curriculum should adapt, embrace or change for the benefit of the future generations?

I had a feeling you were going to ask me that, so I asked ChatGPT! ChatGPT gave me five answers, all of which I think are pretty good – and this comes back to: “Can I outsource my thinking to ChatGPT?” The five things that ChatGPT gave me were: critical thinking, real-world skills, projectbased learning, emotional intelligence and environmental education. Those are the things ChatGPT thinks the curriculum will require as we go into the future. In some ways, I had hoped it wouldn’t say that, as I’d like to disagree with ChatGPT, but I think something like that will be how things develop in the future for education as things move in the direction of us embracing these new technologies.

We would like to thank Mr. Chris Muller, Headmaster at Sir William Perkins’s School, for giving up his time to speak to us.