School Values & Ethos

Exceptional student outcomes and an unrivalled student experience.

Enjoy

The Petersfield School offers our students exceptional academic, pastoral and co-curricular opportunities.

We have built an educational environment that allows all individuals to flourish in our supportive and caring setting.  Highly enjoyable learning experiences take place within a structure of high expectations and challenge.

We believe that learning should be an adventure that fires students’ curiosity.  Our inspirational teaching approaches engender great passion and enthusiasm for the subject.  Speak to our students and they will discuss their learning in vivid terms, full of the energy and excitement of intellectual discovery.

Our state of the art sports facilities, investment in the latest learning technologies and our unique arts spaces build motivation and encourage our students to push themselves beyond their own expectations.

Respect

Our strong pastoral ethos ensures that every student is exceptionally well cared for and is able to rapidly develop as an individual.  We actively cultivate self-discipline, respect and confidence in our students because we believe that these ingredients are essential for a fully successful life.

Each student is placed into one of six Houses and into a tutor group with a tutor who sees them every day.  The tutor and the House are at the heart of the student experience over their five years with us.  Students feel a huge sense of pride in their House and are given opportunities to represent them in numerous competitions ranging from sport, drama, music and academic work.  This friendly rivalry provides a sense of belonging and fellowship for our students and further builds their character.

Consistently high expectations are embedded throughout the school and all students are encouraged to assume leadership and responsibility positions during their time with us.  Our traditional values of hard work, excellent behaviour, courtesy and pride in presentation are all delivered within a warm-hearted context.  Ofsted also judged this area of our work to be outstanding, commenting that “students conduct themselves in an exemplary way. They are courteous and treat each other with respect…they dress smartly and take pride in themselves and the school.”

Achieve

At The Petersfield School we unabashedly strive for academic excellence through an enquiry and challenge based curriculum.  Students are given countless opportunities to be their best and we seek to give them the widest range of learning experiences.

All students leave us with a very strong set of core qualifications that prepare them well for the career of their choice.  We excel at the traditional disciplines of English, Maths, Science, Humanities and Languages.  However, we also aim to build on students’ individual strengths and we offer an incredibly broad range of subjects that help to foster students’ passion for their learning.  For GCSE they can select from subjects including Engineering, Fashion, Computing, Ceramics, Further Maths and Photography.

Our personalised and inclusive approach to the curriculum provides all students with the best possible learning opportunities.  Our Gifted and Talented programme is well established and really stretches the most able students with Ofsted noting that the “most able students are motivated and supported to achieve very highly… their learning needs in lessons are met and the school provides a range of challenges.”