At St Nicholas’ our focus is always to help nurture and develop a holistic education for every child. We relish the challenge of helping pupils to develop in all areas, taking learning out of the normal classroom paradigm, ensuring that we are truly a Preparatory School in nature as well as by name. Supporting pupils to refine strengths and develop new ones by tackling new challenges is an essential element of life at our school, and we achieve this through the support of the whole community, ensuring that we can provide an education that prepares pupils for the challenges of the modern world.
We provide a nurturing, caring social environment, based on family values, in which the views of all members are heard, valued, and respected. Students are supported in their development and turn support one another.
We develop and deliver an exciting curriculum, built to provide pupils with the skills and knowledge that they need to succeed beyond our School and beyond the classroom, providing real-world applications for their learning. Our small class sizes help our teachers to tailor this curriculum to each child's specific learning style and need, allowing us to support and extend in each lesson.
We ensure that all pupils are allowed to learn in a variety of ways, placing a high emphasis on the development of life skills such as organization, confidence, and leadership, truly preparing pupils for the challenges that they will face in the future.
We recognize the strengths we have when we join together as a school community and also celebrate each other’s differences that make each of us important as an individual. We respect what makes us individuals and embrace opportunities for collaboration.
We value the opportunity to contribute to the wider world working hard with families to build a strong school community, taking an active role in our local community, and teaching children the role we have as part of a global community.
Our Core Values are:
- Independent
- Respectful
- Compassionate
- Resilient
- Collaborative
- Ambitious
- Responsible
We are incredibly proud of all that we do at St Nicholas’, and we feel we have a unique School with many positives that help inspire our pupils every day. Our specially designed curriculum focuses on important life skills that operate across subjects and beyond the classroom, giving pupils choice in what and how they study and extending their personal and academic development.
It should quickly be apparent that we create a very special learning environment for our pupils. Our School provides pupils with academic challenges and opportunities for personal growth that make a Preparatory School education so unique, in a setting where children are nurtured and encouraged to be the best that they can be.
We can achieve this through several means our small class sizes mean that our pupils are both supported and stretched, allowing us to engage with each individual in each lesson to clarify misconceptions and challenge and extend understanding. The inclusion of CIPS (Creative, Independent, Problem Solving) within our curriculum emphasizes this, where pupils are provided an opportunity to engage with the subject matter on their terms, developing skills applicable beyond the classroom in a context they wish to explore. This exciting element of the curriculum ensures that we take pupils beyond merely academic development and focus on their growth as an individual as is essential for pupils of this age and those in a Prep School environment.
St Nicholas School was founded in 1937 and started as a preparatory school for boys. The school was originally housed in the room, which is now the Nursery. The original building has been extended during several stages to accommodate more classrooms.
Since then the school has continued to grow and develop into the happy and caring school with a family atmosphere that exists today. We still hold many of the traditional values which the school began with but have also moved with the times to ensure the children are well prepared for the next phase in their education.
On March 31st, 2017 St Nicholas celebrated its 80th birthday with a special joint concert with Buxlow Prep. This concert was an opportunity for our two communities to come together and celebrate, including many wonderful musical and spoken performances, and we look forward to reaching more anniversaries in the future as the School continues to grow and provide an excellent round education to our pupils.
