St. Margaret’s Prep School provides your child with the best possible start to their educational journey.

How do we know this? We see children making amazing progress every day, and the ISI told us too:

“Pupils achieve considerable success in a range of academic and other achievements throughout their time at the school. The oldest pupils gain places at their chosen senior schools, being well prepared for their selection procedures.” ISI 2021

St. Margaret’s has an outstanding record of academic achievement and though we are a non-selective school, expectations of what pupils can achieve here are high. We focus on inspiring our children to love learning, be inquisitive, become effective researchers and to work collaboratively.  We are passionate about using technology to enhance the learning experience.

We are extremely proud of our ability to help pupils move successfully to their chosen secondary schools. St. Margaret’s has an enviable record of success in 11+ exams and academic scholarships to a wide range of competitive independent schools in the area.  Our outcomes are high and significantly above the national average, with children making outstanding progress whatever their ability level.

“In nationally standardised tests, most pupils achieve results above the national average and a high rate of progress is maintained throughout the school.” The school makes excellent use of standardised data and in all year groups pupils’ progress is carefully monitored.” ISI 2021

This success at Year 6 is the result of many years of careful teaching.  The children are continually monitored as they progress through the school from the moment they arrive, with a combination of teacher assessments, observations and formative and summative testing using the GL Assessment suite.

There is a wide range of abilities among our pupils, but we focus on each child outperforming their underlying cognitive ability (value added).  We rigorously track and monitor our data to ensure a full understanding of the whole curriculum, that boys and girls are performing equally well in both maths and English, and that all our children are progressing very well on their own learning journey.

The results are impressive – for example given a national average standardised score of 100, our Year 5 pupils scored an average standardised score of 119 in English. Our Year 6s scored similarly impressive results, and this puts us among the best performing schools in Cognita UK.

In 2021/22 the 27 Year 6 pupils gained 43 scholarships, awards and 11+ places.