Skills focus puts Highfield and Brookham in line for top award

Work on a progressive curriculum which blends the stepping stones for academic achievement with the development of essential life skills has put an independent school in Liphook in the running for a prestigious national award.

Highfield and Brookham School has been shortlisted in the ‘Prep School of the Year’ category of this year’s Independent School of the Year Awards.

It follows the implementation last September of the Skills Builder Accelerator Programme, which offers a structured approach to teaching and assessing essential skills such as teamwork, creativity, problem solving and leadership, and ensures that children are equipped with skills that will serve them well throughout education and beyond.

Using the Skills Builder framework, the nursery, pre-prep and prep school which sits in 175-acre grounds on the rural borders of Hampshire, Surrey and West Sussex introduced a ‘Keys Diploma’, which is a unique opportunity for children from Year 3 to Year 8 to receive recognition for the abilities not measured by exams. Instead, merits and distinctions are awarded based on engagement and commitment across the eight skills in all areas of school life – academia, sport, the arts and enrichment.

Suzannah Cryer, Head of Highfield and Brookham, said: “We are incredibly honoured to have been shortlisted for Prep School of the Year. As a school which has a strong record of feeding some of the very best senior schools in the country, we are always looking at ways to stay at the forefront of education.

“We also actively seek feedback from our parent body on a regular basis and a survey this year revealed a strong desire for an increased focus on skills to ensure that our children develop competencies that remain valuable in an ever-evolving world.

“As a result, we are one of very few schools to achieve the Skills Builder Silver Award in their inaugural year of implementing the programme. We are now actively pursuing the Gold Award, thus demonstrating our dedication to continuous improvement.”

The Independent School of the Year Awards are run by Independent School Parent magazine and the finalists will be unveiled in early September.

Highfield and Brookham was recently named a finalist in the annual Education Business Awards for its environmental work and has been named a finalist in the ‘Pastoral Development of the Year’ category in the National Association for Pastoral Care in Education for its Beehive wellbeing project.