The Peterborough School

Word From The Head

Sam McCormick

Excellence with heart is the phrase I keep coming back to. It isn’t a slogan, it’s what I believe good schools do: hold high expectations for every child while never losing sight of the individual in front of you. It’s what TPS has been doing since 1895, and what I want to build on now.

Our values are Family, Ambition, Character and Excellence, and they only really work in that order.

A child who feels known and safe is a child who can be ambitious, build character and pursue excellence. Everything follows from Family first.

That continuity matters more than people expect. A child can join us at six months old and leave at eighteen, known by the same community the whole way through, without the fresh start that so often costs a child something at nursery, at Year 7, at Sixth Form.

It mattered enough to me personally that my own four children have joined me at TPS. Each of them different, and each able to be exactly who they are rather than fit a mould, is the clearest evidence I have that this school does what it says it does.

If you’re weighing up schools for your child, here’s what you’ll find at TPS: pupils known and their individuality celebrated, parents treated as partners rather than spectators, and staff whose care goes well beyond the subjects they teach. That isn’t a line from a prospectus. It’s what I watch happen here, in ordinary classrooms, every day.

Come and see it for yourself.