Alan Turing's Legacy Shaping Sherborne One Hundred Years On
By Alastair Poulain, Deputy Head of Sherborne Prep and Sherborne's Turing Project Lead
In May 1926, with the country’s trains at a standstill due to the General Strike, thirteen-year-old Alan Turing borrowed a bicycle and cycled sixty miles from Southampton to his new school, arriving at Sherborne entirely unfussed by the ordeal. This year, on the exact centenary, I led a group of Sherborne pupils and staff from across the senior and prep schools, recreating that ride and ending in a procession down the town’s infamous Cheap Street. It felt a fitting way to open a year built around the thought: what should this remarkable former pupil, later the codebreaker of Bletchley Park and the father of artificial intelligence, mean to our school today?
The start of the answer arrives next month, when Sherborne and The Turing Project hosts the inaugural Turing AI Conference, from Tuesday 13 to Friday 16 October. The conference opens at Sherborne Prep, where explorer Benedict Allen will give a talk on problem solving, enterprise and adventure before the young learners move on to rotate through interactive stations on coding, entrepreneurship and STEM. On Thursday at the Gryphon School a demonstration of AI-driven robotics from Thales UK, is followed by an interactive lecture on reinforcement learning from Professor Özgür Şimşek, Director of the Centre for AI at the University of Bath. Sherborne Abbey will be the venue for an evening concert of music, poetry and readings on the life and work of Alan Turing, open to all.
Friday is the key conference day hosted by Sherborne Girls in their impressive Merritt Centre. A level pupils will hear from an expert panel on the future of AI, led by Air Marshal Sir Christopher Coville, followed by a digital twin technology demonstration from Sol Rogers of Magnopus, showing applications across industry, defence, medicine, space and entertainment. The afternoon belongs to Tech Fest, a hands-on carousel for pupils from four local schools, led by Microsoft, Bletchley Park, GCHQ, Oracle, Cambridge, Bath and Bournemouth universities.
The conference kickstarts an academic year at Sherborne where Digital Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Character Education will course through the curricular veins of the schools, prep and senior, preparing all for a future full of possibility, with hackathons, entrepreneurial days, lectures, workshops and visiting experts all in the pipeline.
So, 100 years after a young schoolboy got on a borrowed bicycle rather than accept an impossible journey, we hope this conference, and the week around it, shows that same spirit of initiative and positivity is still very much alive at Sherborne, giving families and children a host of reasons to come and visit Sherborne, and Turing's legacy, for themselves.
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