The Junior School is located within the main school building, allowing our pupils to enjoy all their learning on a single site. It complements the Senior School seamlessly, with most of our Junior School pupils progressing to Form 1 and beyond. Many are also siblings of students in the upper years, reinforcing a strong sense of community. As one united Kensington family, it’s a joy to see pupils of all ages learning and growing together.
In the Junior School, we follow the English National Curriculum, organised into three key stages:
- Early Years Foundation Stage (ages 3–5), which includes Nursery and Reception;
- Key Stage 1 (ages 5–7) Junior 1 and Junior 2
- Key Stage 2 (ages 7–11) Junior 3 to Junior 6
Our class sizes are deliberately small, enabling our teachers to build strong relationships with each child and provide a truly personalised learning experience.
The curriculum is delivered by fully qualified, native English-speaking teachers. We maintain high academic standards, with teaching and assessment aligned to those for children of the same age in the United Kingdom.
In the Junior School, we are committed to nurturing our children not only academically, but socially, emotionally, and physically. Our goal is to help all children become confident, resilient, and healthy learners, equipped to face any future challenges they may encounter.
Maths, reading and writing are taught daily. Science and foundation subjects are taught weekly by the class teacher, following the statutory guidelines of the English and National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage.
We are also fortunate to have specialist teachers who deliver weekly lessons in computing, PE, and music. These subject specialists teach across both the Junior and Senior School, ensuring continuity and meaningful progression from ages 3 to 18.
Physical, Social and Health Education (PSHE) is taught across the entire Junior School by our Head of Junior School, enabling meaningful discussions on important topics such as mental health and well-being.
Spanish is taught across all year groups in the Junior School, with lesson frequency increasing as students progress. Our youngest pupils receive two Spanish lessons per week, while older students benefit from up to three Spanish lessons weekly. Starting in Junior 6, students also begin learning French, taught by a specialist French teacher from our Senior School.
Key Stage 1
As children move into Key Stage 1, they build upon the foundations that they put in place during their time in the Early Years in a warm, inclusive environment that continues to nurture the children’s creativity, curiosity, and confidence.
Our small class sizes allow for individualised attention, ensuring that every child can flourish in their learning journey. Highly-skilled teachers and enthusiastic support staff place a strong emphasis on social and emotional development, creating a nurturing atmosphere where children feel safe, valued, and motivated to learn.
Across J1 and J2, pupils broaden and deepen their learning, knowledge, skills and understanding across the curriculum through a variety of rich learning opportunities. These experiences and activities allow them to reinforce and embed their learning and skills, whilst also mastering the curriculum expectations for their year group.
Our curriculum in the foundation subjects is shaped around a small-steps approach which allows children to master learning in an incremental and sequential way. Carefully crafted learning experiences ensure every child builds confidence whilst deepening their knowledge, skills and understanding gradually, leading to a strong grasp of key concepts and big ideas.
The children continue their languages learning with weekly Spanish lessons with specialist languages teachers, and in J2, Catalan and Medi in introduced for some children. Our Admissions Team can share more information with you regarding the qualifying criteria for the Catalan curriculum.
Phonics and Early Reading
We follow the highly respected scheme Read Write Inc which provides one clear route to reading.
Phonics is taught discretely and daily with all staff following the scheme with fidelity. Our children learn to read and write effectively and quickly using Read Write Inc. Phonics programme. We make sure that pupils read books that are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and the common exception words. This is so that, early on, they experience success and gain confidence that they are readers. Re-reading and discussing these books with the teacher supports their increasingly fluent decoding. Alongside their decodable reading book, children’s reading for pleasure is developed and encouraged by having high-quality books to share.
Maths
In Key Stage 1, we use the White Rose Maths scheme which provides a clear, structured approach to developing strong number sense and mathematical understanding. Lessons are designed to build fluency, reasoning, and problem-solving skills through practical activities, visual representations, and step-by-step progression. This mastery approach ensures that children gain a deep, secure understanding of key concepts, laying a solid foundation for future learning in Maths.
Key Stage 2
As children continue their learning journey into Key Stage 2, the focus remains on ensuring that we support the development of happy, well-educated and independent learners. We deliver the next stages in a National Curriculum that is engaging, challenging, spiralling and fun. Our aim is to instill a genuine love for learning. This is achieved through ensuring that our children are given opportunities to question, express their ideas and take risks knowing that they are supported and encouraged to make mistakes.
English
From Junior 3 onwards, children have daily English lessons, as well as Comprehension and Guided Reading sessions. Grammar, punctuation, spelling and composition are interwoven across the curriculum providing regular rich writing opportunities. Children are exposed to a wide range of high quality texts that challenge their vocabulary, deepen their inference skills and inspire their creativity. Quality first teaching ensures that all children are able to access the curriculum and those who require a more personalised approach with their language development are further supported by our Learning Support team.
Maths
Using the White Rose Education resources, our teachers ensure a solid grasp of the number system and the ability to solve problems using diverse methods. By approaching tasks practically, before pictorially, and eventually using an abstract method, children are able to explore numbers in their own way and develop the confidence needed for more complex calculations. Problem-solving is a key focus and children learn to reason mathematically using key vocabulary, identify relationships and develop well-supported proofs when reasoning.
Wider Curriculum
We want our children to question the world around them and become curious learners. In science, we regularly explore concepts through a range of practical activities, child-led investigations combined with school trips. History and geography topics are chosen with care to ensure they are relevant, interesting and support the teaching and learning of key skills. Such topics include World War 2, the Romans, ‘Extreme Earth’ and the impacts of tourism. In history, children are encouraged to discuss the reliability of sources, empathise with people from the past and give their opinion on the impact of past events on their lives today. In geography, we focus on using key vocabulary to explain physical processes and discuss the relationship between humans and our geological environment.
Languages, music, computing and PE are taught by specialist teachers ensuring children receive the highest quality teaching across the curriculum.
Our children leave the Junior School ready for the next stage in their learning journey as they move upstairs into our Senior School.
English as an Additional Language (EAL)
English language underpins every mainstream subject, giving the EAL department a unique role in supporting pupils' academic goals.
Lessons are provided on a needs basis in small groups, allowing lessons to be tailored to the specific language requirements of individual students. With that in mind, EAL support is provided for students from different language backgrounds who have limited experience of using English in an educational setting who benefit from additional language support.
PE
Early Years Foundation Stage
Physical development in the foundation stage is about experiencing and improving coordination, control, manipulation and movement. Exercise helps children gain confidence in what they can do and enables them to feel the positive benefits of being healthy and active as well as developing a positive sense of well being. At this stage pupils start with swimming lessons.
Key Stage 1
Pupils explore basic skills, actions and ideas with increasing understanding. They are asked to remember and repeat simple skills and actions with increasing control and coordination. Pupils also learn to apply rules and conventions for different activities and to observe, describe and copy what others have done. Pupils continue with swimming lessons once a week
Key Stage 2
Athletic activities such as taking part in competitions that call for precision, speed, power or stamina are added and pupils are asked to use running, jumping and throwing skills both singly and in combination. These activities are alternated with numerous invasion games as well as striking and field games. Pupils continue with swimming lessons once a week and learn to swim unaided for a sustained period of time over a distance of at least 25 metres.