International Women’s Day Celebrations ✨

King’s House School would like to wish you all a belated Happy International Women’s Day! We had many activities taking place across the school to highlight the day and honour all the incredible women around us.

In our Nursery, the children celebrated with a visit from Mrs Yau Wai Lam who came to demonstrate the traditional Japanese martial art — Bojutsu 棒術. Mrs Lam is a black belt and performed a Bo Kata for the children.The whole Nursery loved the demonstration as well as learning about Bojutsu and the female samurai warriors called Onnna-Bugeisha.

Our Junior Department celebrated with an assembly on gender equality run by Amanda Doliveux and Cheryl Wood. Following on from the assembly, each class created a profile poster focusing on an influential woman. This poster board created a lovely display highlighting women around the world who have accomplished incredible successes in areas that were predominantly considered to be male-led.

At the top end of the school in our Senior Department, children learnt about gender equality and how society has changed over time. Children were tasked to complete themed activity cards with prompts such as “discuss five issues you would like to fix for girls and women” and “make a gift for a girl or woman who is special to you” to help facilitate important peer discussions and critical thinking.

International Women’s Day has become an even more special day in more recent years for King’s House School as we continue to accelerate as a coeducational school. It’s been wonderful to see the school develop over the past 3 years since we first welcomed girls to the school. When we first began our transition to coeducation, key staff spent a long time visiting other schools that had made the same move, as well as reviewing our practices in all areas of school life to ensure we were thoroughly prepared to offer girls a seamless start to their journey at King’s House School. Some of these initial changes included facility updates, a pastoral care review, professional development to better equip staff, curriculum changes and widening the range of co-curricular clubs offered to appeal to all children.

Reflecting back now on our initial transition, we are very pleased with how our coed journey has progressed, with girls now in all departments of the school and in over half of our year groups! At King’s House, we are committed to ensuring we are providing both boys and girls with the best possible education and opportunities. Looking forward as girls further progress throughout the school, we are committed to ensuring this journey continues to be smooth for all involved.

Sport

This year, we saw the introduction of new sports such as Hockey and Netball in our Junior and Senior Departments to broaden the breadth of PE provision to suit all King’s House children. Amy Williams, our Lead on Games for Girls expresses, “It has been wonderful to have girls join us in the Senior Department this year, making the most of these new sporting opportunities. Our Year 4 girls have taken part in both Football and Hockey fixtures this year so far, as well as representing King’s House School in several swimming galas and cross country competitions. Girls in the Junior Department took part in our Football exhibition matches alongside the boys, and have been developing their netball skills this term at games. Dance continues to be a highlight within our P.E curriculum, and was particularly enjoyed by our Reception Foxes and Badgers classes this term, focussed around our key topic of nature. Physical Literacy is embedded throughout our P.E and Games curriculum from Nursery to Year 8, and children develop transferable skills which can be applied across a variety of sports and activities. We look forward to seeing the children continue to flourish and enjoy their sport at King’s House.”

Pastoral Care

Alex Churcher, our Head of Pastoral Care has worked closely with key school staff to ensure that both girls and boys alike are supported as we transition to coeducation. Along with establishing new extended leadership teams across the school, we have recently appointed Cheryl Wood as the new Well-being and PSHE/RSE Pastoral Lead across the school. This appointment will help us to further ensure girls and boys are integrating appropriately as they progress throughout the school.

We have also recently signed up to a training package called Girls on Board, which offers training to staff on supporting and nurturing girls at school. The training will be available to all our staff and they will be working through different modules over the next few months.

As we now have girls in our Senior Department, we have ensured training around puberty education and support for the children is in place, as well as providing sanitary products.

Senior Schools

Our relationship with Senior Schools have always been a priority at King’s House, specifically in our Senior Department as families begin the process of looking into the next step in their educational journey. Martin Shore, Deputy Head of the Senior Department and Mark Turner, Headmaster, have long standing relationships with a number of senior schools, with a large majority of these schools being coeducation institutions that have historically been very popular choices for King’s House Leavers, such as Epsom College, St John’s, Latymer, Kingston Grammer, Emmanuel, Ibstock Place, Thomas’s College – as well as Westminster and King’s College School who are also moving to co-education.

Although coeducational secondary schools are popular destinations for our leavers, we have also begun to build up many new relationships with girls-only senior schools to ensure the opportunities are there for our girls, as they are for boys. Martin Shore and Mark Turner have visited a range of girls’ senior schools such as Godolphin and Latymer, Surbiton High School and St Catherine’s, and have visits lined up to Putney High and LEH.

A key conversation topic during these visits is around testing, preparation and key qualities these schools are looking for to ensure we have the best possible preparation in place to meet these processes. It has become apparent in these recent visits and discussions with Senior Schools that the preparation we have put in place historically for the boys will also serve the girls well in terms of preparing them for the various tests. Many of the girls’ schools use the ISEB pre-tests, which we have now been preparing the children for since 2015. Where they are using their own assessments, we are now building up an understanding of what they are looking for and require. For general tests like the Girls School Consortium papers, we have started gaining information on them to tailor our teaching and preparation for girls interested in attending these schools.

Both our Head of English, Lucy Jones, and our Head of Maths, Georgie Richards, have also been to visit Godolphin and Latymer to meet their respective Heads of Departments there, and talk to them about what they are looking for in their papers and tests. Lucy Jones has also been investigating the St Paul’s Girls School papers, which are their own, highly-testing exams, so that we can work out how to prepare the girls for these.

It was great to talk this all through at our recent Future Schools evenings we host annually for our parents with children in Years 3 to 5, to begin the conversations around preparing for senior school selections, next steps for families to think about and other key information to help support families through the journey of selecting a senior school which is best for their child.