‘Speak Up! Year 6’ is an exciting public speaking programme for Year 6 students from Wimbledon High Junior School and 12 partner primary schools from across the maintained and independent sectors. Now in its second year, 'Speak Up!' is all about pupils sharing their views, learning from each other’s differences, and building vital communication skills that will help with academic and personal development.

Led by Wimbledon High Junior School, it is funded by the contributions of partner schools from the independent sector, covering all costs for maintained schools. Training is delivered in partnership with Speakers Trust, the UK’s leading public speaking training charity.

Each year, over 500 Year 6 pupils and their teachers take part in the Speak Up partnership. Teachers receive a day’s training and deliver a series of prepared workshops to their Year 6 pupils. During the workshops, the pupils develop the core skills of public speaking and prepare a speech on the topic of their choice. 

The top 4% of speakers are selected to represent their school at the Grand Final, delivering their speech in front of an audience of friends, family, and an expert judging panel - competing head-to-head to be crowned the Speak Up! Year 6 Champion.

Students finish these workshops with a strong sense of empowerment and with skills they can take with them to their next stages of education.

You can view the 'Speak Up! Year 6' website here. 

The Kenyan Cultural Exchange is a partnership with a school Located in Majimoto, on the outskirts of the Masai Mara game reserve, Kenya. The school caters for the local Masai children, started by the local Masai community in 2002 to help with the literacy and numeracy shortfall among children in the area.

Wimbledon High has been participating in a successful partnerships programme with the school for over a year, in which Year 11 and Y12 girls have been delivering conversational English lessons and participating in cultural exchange through Microsoft Teams. We have been delighted to be able to extend this opportunity to Year 6 girls during the summer term. The learning aims of the lessons have been the development of conversational English and Literacy, with a particular focus on spelling, grammar and pronunciation.

Students from both schools have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know each other and learning about our different ways of life. Discussions about food, wildlife and of course the weather have been of particular interest to the children, and most recently we have enjoyed sharing presentations about hobbies and interest, during which we have swapped recipes, learnt new language and shared fashion tips! We very much look forward to the continued development of this partnership next year. 

Recently, Reception classes took a stroll to make new friends with the Reception classes at Wimbledon Common Prep School, as part of a brand new Play Partnership. 

The girls played together with the boys over games, metal detecting in the sandpit, making bracelets, playing shopkeeper, and taking part in a bunch of arts and craft activities before having a break for snacks. There was much excitement when they found out that they would be seeing each other again: the Wimbledon Common Prep boys will be visiting Wimbledon High Juniors next March, with a Summer Picnic planned in June... exciting stuff! 

Flickr album: Reception with Wimbledon Common Prep School | Height: auto | Theme: Default | Skin: Default Skin

Building on the success of our Wild Girls Outdoor Learning Programme, we partnered with the team at Granard Primary School to create a new EYFS focused-project that provided space for team-teaching between EYFS practitioners and children from two different settings to work together to solve simple problems and apply the burgeoning skills of working and playing cooperatively with others in the beautiful open spaces of Wimbledon Common.  

Watch highlights:

We are part of an Ogden Trust Partnership and a number of initiatives have been made possible because of this. Each year we borrow a set of telescopes from the partnership for Year 5 pupils to take home to observe the night sky with their families.  We have provided Earth and Space supporting materials for the other schools to also use alongside the telescopes and have enjoyed comparing notes with them about our observations. We have also supplied the ten schools in the Ogden Partnership with boxes of equipment to run their own IET Faraday Challenge Day. This is a STEAM day that we have run here at Wimbledon high for several years that involves teams of pupils working together to develop their problem solving and team working skills (see Junior STEAM).

Alex Farrer, Head of Junior School Science, is an accredited trainer of the Primary Science Capital Teaching Approach and delivers the PSCTA training to teachers at many schools across the country. As well as benefiting the teaching at WHS it also has impacted the teaching at many local schools. Alex has also worked with the Wellcome Genome Campus to co-develop the Science4Everyone materials raising awareness of unconscious bias and influencing attitudes towards science.

In January 2023, WHS was awarded funding to run a cluster of 10 schools to promote excellence in science teaching and learning. The 10 schools meet each term to develop initiatives to improve science outcomes for every pupil and teacher in the Cluster.

Each year we run a PSQM hub of 5-10 schools. Alex Farrer is an experienced PSQM Regional Hub leader and mentors the schools, delivering training in science subject leadership so that the schools can all achieve the prestigious quality mark after a year-long professional development programme. Wimbledon High School also gained PSQM Outreach in 2019, and then successfully re-accredited in 2023, achieving the quality mark at PSQM Hub level (our school is the only school in the country to hold this quality mark) demonstrating our excellence in primary science teaching, learning and leadership.

For the last two years Madame Dubois (Head of Junior Art) and Alex Farrer (Head of Junior Science) have been writing a teacher resource called Sketchbook Science. This consists of 10 activities that fuse art and science whilst maintaining the academic rigour in both subjects. The activities have been trialled in 18 schools and have been tweaked in light of teacher feedback. Watch this space for the publication of the resource in the new year!

Each year,Year 5 from WHS are joined by Year 5  from West Wimbledon Primary to take part in Out of this World Space Day. This day consists of pupils from both schools working together to tackle space related challenges. They learn about astronauts and space travel challenges over the years as well as investigating heat shields, waste in space, space health  and fitness and  looking around the International Space Station using virtual reality headsets. This day has taken place for several years now and is a highlight of the Earth and Space topics at both schools.