Welcome. Bienvenue. Willkommen. Bienvenidos. Welcome to Barney.
And whether you have come from afar, from Münster, Munich, Berlin or Düsseldorf; from Montenegro, Madrid or Barcelona; from Hong Kong or Dubai, or from rather closer to home: Barnard Castle, Gainford, Durham, Carlisle, Hexham, Northumberland, or Northallerton, you are very, very welcome.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m David Cresswell, and I have the enormous privilege of being Headmaster of this school.
For our new pupils, this is really where your time at Barney begins.
And we begin it here, in Chapel, deliberately.
In a few moments, we are going to have our Welcome Ceremony. It is a very simple ceremony, but I think it is an important one, because I get the opportunity formally to welcome each of you into this school.
And I want to say something about that word: welcome.
Because this isn’t a superficial welcome. It isn’t simply us saying, “It’s nice to have you here.”
We really mean it.
In fact, I don’t particularly want you to fit in at Barney.
I want you to belong here.
There is a difference.
Fitting in can mean changing yourself to be like everybody else.
Belonging means being known, being valued, and being part of something, while still being yourself.
And the first place in which you will belong here is your House.
Your House will become one of the constants of your school life. It is where you will find friends, where you will compete, laugh, celebrate, occasionally commiserate, and where there will always be people looking out for you.
So in a moment, I will ask our House staff to come forward and we will formally welcome you into that community.
And I hope you remember that it started here.
Because Chapel marks some of the great moments of a Barney education. Today, you sit here at the very beginning of yours.
And, although it probably feels a very long way away, one day you will sit here at the other end of it, at your Valedictory Service.
You will be a rather different person by then.
And that journey, from the person sitting here today to the person who eventually leaves us, is really what education is all about.
Now that we have officially welcomed you, I want to share just a few thoughts about what lies ahead.
The first is this:
Education is a conversation.
And that conversation begins today.
There are things you should expect from us.
You should expect us to know your children. You should expect us to challenge them. You should expect us to notice when things are going brilliantly, and when they aren’t. You should expect us to care about who they are becoming, not simply the grades they achieve.
And there are things we will expect from our pupils too.
To throw themselves into school life. To work hard. To be kind. To take some risks. To discover things they are good at, and to have a go at some things they may be spectacularly bad at.
And for parents, I would ask one thing in particular: talk to us.
If something doesn’t feel right, communicate with us early.
Schools work best when pupils, parents, and teachers are talking to one another. Problems rarely improve by being left alone, and misunderstandings are much easier to resolve when they are small.
So please see this as a partnership.
The second thing I want you to understand is what we are trying to achieve here.
We talk at Barney about three things:
Community. Character. Ambition.
Community comes first deliberately.
Because before young people can really be ambitious, they need to feel that they belong.
Once they do, ambition at Barney can take an extraordinary number of forms.
It might mean achieving the grades to study medicine or engineering. It might mean standing on a stage for the first time. Playing for a team. Singing in Chapel. Discovering a love of art, languages, or history. Building something. Leading something. Helping someone else. Trying something you never imagined you would be able to do.
There is no single model of success here.
That matters to us.
We have recently celebrated some outstanding academic results, of which we are enormously proud. But behind those results is something even more important: our determination to make the education fit the pupil, rather than expecting every pupil to fit the same education.
That is why we continue to think carefully about our curriculum and our courses, making sure that what we offer reflects the young people actually sitting in front of us.
And it is also why we are thinking hard about what education needs to become.
Because your children are growing up at an extraordinary moment.
Artificial intelligence is already changing the way we work, communicate and learn. The world they enter when they leave Barney will be different from the world their parents entered.
That is exciting.
And it raises some fascinating questions for schools.
Through the Barney Institute for Learning and Innovation, which you will hear more about this year, and our wider work, we are asking what young people will need in that future.
How do we develop intellectual curiosity alongside emotional intelligence?
How do we teach young people to use extraordinarily powerful technology without becoming dependent upon it?
How do we develop judgement, creativity, empathy and character, the deeply human qualities that may become more important, not less, in an age of artificial intelligence?
In other words, we are not simply asking:
“What do our pupils need to succeed at school?”
We are asking:
“What will our pupils thank us for when they are 25? When they are 35?”
That is a much more interesting question.
And it is one I hope we never stop asking.
So I want to finish with a thought for our pupils, and then one for your parents.
To our new pupils:
You have got so much to look forward to.
There will be friendships you haven’t made yet.
Subjects you don’t yet know you love.
Matches you haven’t played. Plays you haven’t performed. Concerts you haven’t sung in. Trips you haven’t taken. Teachers who will inspire you. Mistakes you haven’t made yet, and quite a few things that won’t go according to plan.
All of that is ahead of you.
And sitting here today, at the very beginning of your Barney journey, I am excited not just about what you are going to achieve.
I am excited about the person you are going to become.
And to our parents:
Be part of this place too.
Come and see us. Watch matches. Come to concerts and plays. Spend time here. Get to know the school your son or daughter is going to call home.
And if you live overseas, or indeed if you don’t, there is one date I would particularly encourage you to put in your diary now.
Come back for Nine Lessons and Carols in the final week of this term.
Come back into this Chapel.
By then, the pupil sitting beside you today will have had a whole term at Barney.
They will know their way around. They will have made friends. They will have stories to tell. They will have begun to belong.
And when you sit together in this Chapel again, I think you will see just how much can happen in a few short months.
You won’t be disappointed.
For now, though, this is the beginning.
Welcome to your House.
Welcome to our community.
And, most importantly, welcome to Barney.
