Over 70 schools will be offered the opportunity to take part. Our students will involved in making the artwork itself, as well as supporting our partner schools with the project. Speaking about the opportunity, Mrs Longstaff has said: 

“This is a fantastic opportunity for our young people in Wandsworth to work together and take increased ownership of their community role. The project very much reflects Putney High School’s “It Starts with Me” ethos and expands this to “It Starts with Us”. We’re seeing more and more how our students are actively wanting to find ways that they can make a tangible difference and our involvement in this project provides an opportunity to do just that.”  

A Place to Call Home, is a collective artwork, one which responds deeply to these ideas, and proposes that communal living can be expanded into a societal context: if a family lives in a house, then a community too, is a place where we all live—it’s a home within a home. We will work on a collective architecture, an artwork which is born through many parts, and is built, together, brick by brick. Our ‘home’ when experienced in its entirety, will encapsulate the collective experience and imaginings of children across Wandsworth. No matter their school status or demographic, their voices will be heard and woven into this artwork, representing variety, diversity and the social fabric of our community. They will create a place to call home.’

Academic staff at Putney and Roehampton work together to design a different practical or academic projects for pupils to complete each term.  It is aimed at ‘gifted and talented’ primary school pupils from Year 5 and follows them through two years of involvement until they reach the end of Year 6 and are beginning the transition to Senior School.

Putney High School’s Year 8 students act as mentors to the younger children over the course of the two years, looking with them at topics from Philosophy, STEM and the Environment to Sports Science, Art and Music.

“The whole programme has given the children a chance to expand their horizons, try something new, work with other children and of course have fun!” 

Together with Hotham, All Saints, Ronald Ross, Smallwood and Mosaic we enjoyed a Computer Science workshop at Roehampton and a Drama mystery Workshop at Putney. In June the last session of this year will take place about sustainability.

The first Festival of Sport, led by the Wandsworth Schools Partnership, has been designed to offer local primary schools the opportunity to experience new sports, to develop skills and make connections with other local children before they move to senior school.

We are planning the event in collaboration with The Roche and Saint Cecilia’s Secondary School. Enable Sport Wandsworth are keen to support this fun and enriching sport opportunity this year with activities like:

• Lacrosse
• Rowing (ergos)
• Cricket
• Netball
• Table tennis
• Quidditch
• Team-building

The “Access to Success” workshops are the brainchild of Miami and Ikram, both of whom joined Putney in the Sixth Form as bursary students. They are using their own experience to encourage local children from Years 5 and 6 to learn more about senior Maths and Science and inspire them with some fun and engaging STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) based challenges.

Read more about the Maths workshop in November and the Science workshop in January. In June they will provide their second Maths workshop.

Putney High School are part of the West London Partnership, a group of 10 Independent and State schools in West London. Student representatives from Year 10 and the Sixth Form have been participating in a student forum, designed to harness ideas for collaboration across the partnership. The first student-led event was held in February – a ‘Battle of the Bands’ – with 9 performances from across the network, hosted at Hammersmith Academy.

The National Cyber Security Centre run an annual competition called CyberFirst. They run it to encourage girls to think about Cyber Security as a possible career path in what is a traditionally male-dominated role. The competition is an online game where students work through puzzles to crack codes and catch the hackers.

Offered out to Senior Schools within the Wandsworth Schools Partnership cluster as well as the West London Partnership

Financial awareness has arguably never been of greater importance. Our new partnership project with Fulham Cross Girls’ School looks to address this through offering twilight lessons in Financial Literacy to a mixed cohort of 26 Year 9 students.

The Level 2 qualification developed by the London Institute of Banking and Finance (LIBF), will allow students the opportunity to develop their understanding of finance, within a structured programme running once every two weeks for two years, led by Mr Andrew Ross our Head of Economics and Business. 

Throughout the course, students will learn about: 

• Achieving personal financial goals, methods of borrowing and repaying money, personal and small business banking, financial advice, creating and managing budgets 

• Ethics, sustainability, business models, financial careers, principles of UK taxation and marketing 

• Financial regulation, protection, and the impact of debt 

• Financial services providers and how they function linked to careers in banking, accounting, investment, insurance, and financial technology (fintech)  

• Real-life application of numeracy and mathematical skills used within financial services 

Full details of the qualification may be found at: https://www.libf.ac.uk/docs/default-source/qualification-specifications/financial-education/tcf-final.pdf?sfvrsn=439e3f8d_2

Our students are willing role models and enjoy ‘giving back’ both within the school and to the wider community. You might start or lead a club or society, coach a school sports team, or become one of our many volunteers at the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability, or help local primary school children with their reading.