We also focus on:

• Physical development
• Personal, Social and Emotional development
• Literacy, including reading and writing
• Mathematics
• Understanding the world, including technology
• Expressive art and design.

In addition, children enjoy PE and swimming lessons, and forest school. They will also enjoy learning conversational Spanish from Year 1, preparing them for French and Latin as they move through the school.

Sparking a life-long passion for reading at our private school

Reading is at the heart of the Pre-Prep curriculum and our structured approach fosters a love of language that lasts a lifetime.

We use storytelling, poems, songs and rhymes across the curriculum to develop language and vocabulary. Children build language skills quickly, by absorbing rich texts that inspire and encourage their passion for reading. Each child is supported throughout by staff who are experts in early reading.

Read Write Inc.

In the Pre-Prep through to Year 2, we use Ruth Miskin’s, Read Write Inc. programme. This award-winning scheme provides a highly structured approach to phonics and reading.

Every child who is learning to read will enjoy daily, one-to-one support. This personal approach means that every child has everything they need to meet their full potential.

Making Maths second nature

Mathematics is an essential part of the curriculum, and of life, too. It gives us transferable skills that we use throughout our lives. It grows perseverance, imagination, self-management and working skills. Mastering maths builds a confident attitude to life’s challenges. Most of all, maths helps each child to make sense of the world, and fosters a sense of responsibility for it.

We believe that numeracy should become just another ‘sense’ – that is, something instant and automatic. We encourage every child to develop the maths skills they need for the real world. And we help them to critically examine and justify the methods they choose to tackle problems.

Focus text topic learning

Through our Focus Topic learning approach, we encourage each child to make links to topics through themes and conventions, which they uncover as they explore various high quality texts.

Throughout all of our teaching, we embed comprehension skills by challenging every child to use prediction and inference as they read.

For their written work, we help them to practically and purposefully apply their grammar skills. We also ask them to consider their audience, and what they want to achieve through their writing.