Head of Learning Strategies

Holmewood House is a vibrant and thriving Preparatory school located on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells. Holmewood House is a non-selective school where, according to our ISI report, “The quality of pupils’ academic and other achievements; and the quality of pupils’ personal development” were both deemed ‘excellent’. We are a busy, welcoming and dynamic school community; our school values of self-belief, aspiration and kindness inform everything we do.

Our beautiful school is set within 30 acres of stunning grounds, equipped with state of the art classroom facilities, a 6 lane, 25m indoor swimming pool and 500 seat theatre, as well as our Learning Hub and Learning Strategies area which are both centrally located within the school to support and enhance our teaching and learning provision for every child.

Our teachers all share a love of the children in their care and all our teachers are Form Teachers or Assistant Form Teachers too, as we believe the pastoral and academic areas of school life as intrinsically linked. We celebrate teachers’ further learning and have supported three different colleagues through two Masters in Education and one MBA respectively in the last two academic years. We welcome colleagues who explicitly connect research with practice and want to bring ideas to the table. Our teachers from all areas of the school can join our Teacher Learner Community, which collaborates to share teaching and learning innovation, research and ideas to support continual development. All teachers have access to in-house drop-in counselling support and in-house coaching, should they wish to work on specific areas of their wellbeing or professional practice. We also have a peer mentoring system in place for both teachers and pupils who are keen for further support and guidance. Many of our teachers volunteer to support pupils and teachers in both these mentoring programs.

We regard these vital preparatory school years as forming the very foundation on which our pupils build their lifelong learning and indeed their lives. We are mindful of the fact that our pupils’ experience of school and of life at this early age will significantly shape the adults that they will become. To this end, we place a strong emphasis on outstanding pastoral care; we nurture the wellbeing of every child to enable them to thrive within an ever changing and fast paced world. We believe ensuring positive mental health in our community is the very foundation of the learning that follows. To this end, our teachers foster the Holmewood House learning behaviours in their lessons and beyond (featured below) so as to develop our pupils’ self-belief, aspiration and kindness, both towards themselves and others. We offer a rich, broad and balanced curriculum and full array of extracurricular sports and activities, to support every pupil in finding their niche and to grow everyone‘s love of learning.