Head’s Letters

Thursday 7 November 2024

Dear Parents

I hope that everyone enjoyed a restful half term break and it has been good to hear from the children about all the things they did over the past two weeks.

This morning Years 3-8 listened to a great assembly with 8R sharing stories of veterans from across the Commonwealth and how they remember their experiences of fighting on the front line in World War Two. The children spoke about the importance of Remembrance Day and we very much look forward to Monday’s service at school.

Excitement is definitely rising for our Fireworks celebration tomorrow evening and it will be lovely to welcome everyone across at Cox’s Field. It is always a thoroughly enjoyable event and huge thanks to our JPA and Annabel Gaskell for organising it once again this year. Fingers crossed the weather forecast remains dry!

Year 5 are out on a trip to Milestones Museum today, where they will experience life in Victorian times with cobbled streets, 1900s transport and even a Victorian school room. This ties in with their study of the Victorians and is a great way to bring history to life.

On the rugby pitch we had a terrific set of matches against Moulsford for Years 5-8 with all children representing APS and our Year 3 and 4 pupils are looking forward to their tournament this afternoon. Good luck too to our Year 7 and 8 teams who play Abingdon School on Saturday.

Open Morning takes place tomorrow and we look forward to welcoming lots of families to APS to show them all the wonderful things about our school. The Year 7s are conducting tours for them and I know that our children are always wonderful ambassadors for the school.

On Monday we will welcome to school our new school secretary, Sarah Bryant, who is taking on the role after Karen Cornford’s seven years at APS. We wish Karen all the best in her retirement and please do say hello to Sarah as she joins our community.

I look forward to seeing many of you at the fireworks tomorrow.

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 17 October 2024

Dear Parents

As we reach the end of the first half of this busy term, I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on how well your children have settled into the new academic year at Abingdon Prep School. In particular, those new to the school, amongst them the first girls who have joined Reception since we announced our move to co-education. Whilst our co-ed provision within Pre-Prep is already in place, senior colleagues and I continue to focus on key elements for those girls who will join our Prep School in Years 3 to 6 from next September. Similar work is also being undertaken by my colleagues at the Senior School as they prepare to welcome girls to the First Year and Sixth Form in September 2026.

Mr Windsor enjoyed his visit to APS this morning as we wandered around our class pairings with the older year groups reading to the younger year groups. It was lovely to see the warmth of the interactions between the pupils as they read to each other and discussed the different books. We also thoroughly enjoyed seeing the amazing scarecrows that Pre-Prep have created for the scarecrow festival tomorrow afternoon.

This week, Year 2 enjoyed a fantastic trip to Coombe Mill in Witney where they learned about how the water mill worked and also created brilliant hand woven willow bird feeders. On the same day our Year 8s visited The Natural History Museum in Oxford where they continued their scientific studies on evolution and adaptation, and the bravest of them held Madagsascan hissing cockroaches! Year 7 is off tomorrow to visit the Roman Baths in Bath. This is a great opportunity to bring their study of Latin to life and the artefacts and baths themselves are an incredible thing to see first hand. If you have never been then I thoroughly recommend a visit.

On Wednesday morning, Abi Elphinstone, children’s author, spoke to our pupils about the joy of books; how she became an author and the special place that books and stories hold in our lives. It was brilliant for our children in Years 3-7 to hear first hand from a current author and I am sure many of them will have been inspired to further develop their creative writing abilities.

The Foundation photo took place at Abingdon School on Tuesday afternoon and it was a real feat of organisation to get 1270 pupils and more than 200 staff all in the right order and ready for a photo to be taken. It will be lovely to see the final result when it comes through. It really is quite a sight to have the whole foundation in the same place at the same time.

On the rugby pitch this week we had a full range of fixtures for the children in Years 3-8 with some very impressive performances, in both the contact and the touch matches. What stood out more than anything else this week was the significant improvement that all the children have made with their skills and teamwork since the start of term.

Finally, I hope you all have a lovely half term break ahead and I will look forward to welcoming the children back to school on 4 November. Don’t forget to book your tickets for our fireworks display on 8 November.

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 10 October 2024

Dear Parents

This term continues to fly past with just over a week left until the half term break.

In the classroom this week, Year 2 has been learning about the life and works of Vincent van Gogh, whilst Year 3 in their English lessons have been developing their creative writing skills through scary stories, based around Sid’s room in Toy Story. They have been especially focusing on expanded noun phrases and the use of similes and it was lovely to see how much they have progressed since the start of the term. In Science, our Year 8s had their agar jelly petri dishes returned from the lab and will be investigating further the different types of bacteria that were found on surfaces of a range of items in and around school, including their own skin. It was fascinating to see what surfaces came back cleanest, with school toilet seats being one of those!

On Monday, our Year 1s visited Youlbury where they had a lovely day cooking pizza, bread and bananas with chocolate on the campfire. After this hearty lunch they then went on to build shelters in the woods which were needed to keep off the rain showers which have been prevalent this week.

On Wednesday our Year 5s set off for their three day trip to PGL in Liddington. I am told they had a terrific first day taking on a range of adventure activities and canoeing. I look forward to hearing about the rest of the trip on their return.

Art has taken centre stage this week with an art history lecture delivered by Oxford artist Lizzie Rowe to some of our Year 8 pupils. This Saturday sees our first Art workshop of the year taking place, with a day spent printmaking. It is great that we have so many keen pupils signed up to further develop their artistic talents.

The children are looking forward to their wellbeing workshops on Friday. This is such an important aspect of education in today’s world and I am certain the children will enjoy learning about a range of techniques to help them relax and reset.

Our rugby teams continue to perform well and our Year 3s and 4s showed some impressive skills in their matches this week despite the rather wet conditions. Our younger cross country athletes are taking part this afternoon in a series of relays and I am sure they will impress with their performances.

I hope you all have a good weekend ahead.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 3 October 2024

Dear Parents

Science trips have been at the forefront for Year 5 & 6 this week. Year 5 spent Tuesday afternoon at Abingdon School extracting DNA from a kiwi fruit under the guidance of some brilliant Abingdon School Sixth Form pupils. I know they asked some impressive scientific questions to the Sixth Formers too. Tomorrow, our Year 5s and 6s are visiting Rutherford Appleton Laboratories at the Culham Science Park where they will be undertaking a series of activities based around the theme of Space. These will include workshops, a planetarium and taking part in an escape room challenge. I know they are really looking forward to this exciting morning off site. Our Reception children undertake their first school trip tomorrow with a visit to Cogges Farm to follow the story of the ‘Little Red Hen’. They will be planting corn seeds, grinding up corn and even making their own bread. I know they are very excited about taking their learning outside of school, and taking their first journey in the school minibus!

Our assembly theme for both Pre-Prep and Prep this week was amazing achievements of older people. We learned about a 100 year old man who climbed Mount Fuji, a 79 year old lady who drove a Formula 1 car and a 96 year old lady who is still running marathons. I am glad to report though, that in Pre-Prep, they feel that you are not old until you are 80 these days!

Our first house charity event, the Unicorn Tuck Shop sale, will take place next Monday afternoon. Thank you to all of those parents who have so kindly donated supplies for this event already. This year, it has been decided that Down’s Syndrome Oxfordshire is the chosen school charity and we look forward to supporting them with some fundraising in the coming months. This morning, our four houses were presenting and voting for their house charities and it was lovely to see so many children speaking so passionately about a charity they wanted to get behind.

With charity in mind, I wanted to say a huge thank you to our JPA for arranging the Macmillan coffee morning and cake event last Friday. It was great to see so many parents attending and again, thanks to all those who kindly made cakes to sell there. Over £250 was raised for a very worthy cause.

Once again, on the rugby pitch, all the children in Years 3-8 have represented the school this week. There were some terrific performances from the children against strong opposition, with the U12B touch, the U11 touch and U10B touch teams all producing impressive wins in tightly fought contests. Good luck to our U8s who are competing in their first rugby festival on Saturday. Good luck too to our cross country team who are competing in the English Schools Cross Country qualifiers this afternoon.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend when it arrives and I hope to see a number of you at the Abingdon School Open Morning on Saturday.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 26 September 2024

Dear Parents

I am not sure I can remember a time when the rain was torrential for quite as long as it was on Monday. I am not convinced the Oxfordshire road network held up all that well but hopefully the flooding has eased a little on your journeys to and from school now.

Across all of the year groups the children have continued to work hard and impress in the classroom. They are really engaged in their learning and it is good to see the obvious levels of progress.

It has been a very busy week on the sports field with a cross country meet, a swimming gala, two regional IAPS football qualifying tournaments, alongside 14 rugby matches. It was particularly gratifying to see almost every child in Years 3-8 representing APS on the rugby pitch this week in a series of contact or touch matches. Our U12 and U13 teams enjoyed playing their counterparts at Abingdon School on Wednesday, and some excellent rugby was played by both teams.

The joint APS and AS concert on Monday evening was a lovely event as well. I know that the children who attended, both in the audience and performing, will have gained a huge amount from seeing older pupils performing and working alongside them.

Our Design and Technology Arts Award pupils are up in London today visiting the Design Museum and undertaking a workshop. I know they will have learned a lot from the trip and I am sure they will come back full of ideas for their next project. Our Year 8s are continuing the busy week of trips by spending the day on the Jurassic Coast at Durdle Door and Lulworth Cove, collecting data on beach profiles, drawing field sketches of the cove, walking along the South West coastal path and enjoying some fish and chips on the seafront!

I hope that everyone has a good weekend ahead and that the weather improves a little for us all.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 19 September 2024

Dear Parents

It has been lovely to have some settled weather this week without needing to rush inside to avoid a downpour. The weeks continue to fly by with the children throwing themselves into so many different aspects of school life.

I am writing to you today from Wales, as I am away at the IAPS Heads conference. It is a great opportunity to hear from guest speakers and discuss current issues with so many other prep school heads. I have especially enjoyed learning more about AI and AR and how they can be of benefit to both pupils and teachers moving forward.

This week’s assembly for Years 3 to 8 looked at some relaxation techniques and how to use breathing as a tool to promote calm and balance, especially when something might be worrying you. Pre-Prep assembly focused on how to keep yourself safe both in and out of school, tying in with our safety week.

I was fortunate enough to watch some Year 5 French on Wednesday and was impressed by their willingness to tell me their birthdays in French and even ask me some questions. I may need to revisit the classroom to improve my accent though! Year 2 were very much enjoying their mini-makers club and hockey club on Tuesday after school. They are always so involved in their Other Half activities and it is such a key part of school life.

Our rugby season is now well and truly underway with some terrific performances and results this week from all our senior section teams, whilst our U9s enjoyed their first ever contact match and our U8s are representing APS for the first time this afternoon. I am sure they will rise to the occasion and really enjoy themselves. Tomorrow, after school, our first concert platform will take place and it is good to see so many children keen to be involved. It is such a great way to build confidence performing to a small audience.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend ahead of you.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 12 September 2024

Dear Parents

It was lovely to chat to so many of you last Friday evening at our welcome drinks. I hope that those of you who were able to attend enjoyed meeting the teachers and fellow parents.

This week started with a fascinating talk to our senior section from the lead nutritionist at Sodexo, our catering partners, about fuelling your body with the right nutrients. I was enormously encouraged by how much some of our older pupils already knew about this vitally important topic and how engaged they all were throughout.

In the classroom, I have very much enjoyed getting to know our Reception children a little better, and was especially impressed with their spiky hair designs, showing off their developing fine motor skills, by carefully using scissors.

Year 3 was eagerly working on their new History topic of World War 2. They had photos of children being evacuated and were spotting differences between then and now, looking at styles of clothing, luggage and transport. It was great to see them so engrossed in the subject and learning about what children their age had experienced back then.

Year 6 and Year 7 have been loving getting straight back into science experiments this week. Year 6 were working on mass and gravity, experimenting with Newton metres and generating data for their graphs, whilst the Year 7s had the bunsen burners out to heat and cool stearic acid and see the different properties at different temperatures, before again plotting the data points onto graphs. Hands-on learning is so important for children and it is fabulous to see the children enjoying their science so much.

Wednesday saw our U13 team play in their first rugby tournament of the term. They showed great heart and improved enormously over the course of the day, winning one and losing two of their matches. They will have learned a great deal and are looking forward to next week’s fixtures. Matches start in earnest next week for all age groups, who have been training hard in readiness for them.

I hope that you have a relaxing and enjoyable weekend ahead.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 5 September 2024

Dear Parents

It has been lovely to welcome all of the children back to school this week and hear about their holiday adventures.

In lessons this week I have been hugely impressed by the focus the children have shown settling down to their work and the new routines. In English, Year 4 were starting their class reader, ‘Iron Man’, and looking at the different characters and trying to predict what the characters were likely to be like after just a brief introduction. Year 5 were focusing on synonyms, again based around their class reader, ‘Holes’. It was great to see their prior knowledge coming into play working out words such as ‘precipice’ and ‘desolate’, and then using them appropriately in their own work. In Science, Year 8 were working on classification of different organisms and looking at where kelp fitted in – not quite as straightforward as it may first appear being part of the Chromista kingdom. (I was learning this alongside them!)

Our Reception class have settled in beautifully to life at school, loving the trike track, impressing me with their ability to solve a puzzle, and cooking some delicious blackberry and apple crumble, alongside a dough disco! Year 2 were getting straight back into some tricky number work, giving four different ways that a series of numbers could be created. This, alongside their pirate maps and self designed keys has certainly kept them busy this week.

This afternoon sees our music carousel taking place. This is a great opportunity for children to see a huge range of instruments being played by our music teachers and also pupils from Abingdon School. They can also have a go themselves and hopefully be inspired to take up an instrument if they are not already playing one. Playing an instrument is such a great skill to have and I am sure that many of you, like me, wish that we had stuck with it more as a child!

This week’s assembly focused on our three aims at school – Work Hard, Get Involved and Be Kind. I have been especially pleased to see so many of the children modelling these behaviours around school and we will continue to focus on these aims throughout the year ahead.

Last Saturday morning saw more than 50 pupils attend our Year 5-8 pre-season rugby session. I know that Elliot and the coaches were delighted with such a large turnout and it was a terrific way to start to get ready for the term ahead.

I wanted to let you know that unfortunately, Emma Penfold, our Director of Music, will be absent from school from 18 September for a period of time for major surgery. I know you will all join with me in wishing her the best for her recovery. Whilst Emma is away, we have Michael Stinton, former Director of Music at Abingdon School, coming in to teach all of Emma’s classes. Michael is hugely experienced and, of course, knows Abingdon Prep extremely well from his career at Abingdon School. I know he is really excited about working with our APS children.

We are very much looking forward to seeing many of you at the parents’ drinks tomorrow evening (6.45pm). Hopefully the weather will be kind and we can gather in the Quad outside rather than the hall. All the teachers will be there as well so please do take the opportunity to catch up with them.

I hope you all have a good weekend.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 29 August 2024

Dear Parents

I hope that you have all enjoyed a lovely summer break, spending lots of time with your families and friends and enjoying the, mostly, fine weather we have had. The start of a new academic year is always an exciting time and this year is particularly exciting as we welcome our first two girls to Abingdon Prep’s Reception class, alongside more than 30 other new joiners across all sections of the school. We are very much looking forward to getting to know all of our new pupils and of course, seeing our returning students and hearing about what they have been getting up to during the break.

In the final week of last term, we underwent a material change inspection (in light of our move to co-education) from the Independent Schools Inspectorate and I am delighted to say that they have approved the change. The report is on our website.

Today, we have welcomed back to school all of our teachers and support staff for the first of our three INSET days. It has been great to catch up with everyone and be able to prepare ourselves to welcome back all of the children on Tuesday. I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome Charles Newbury, our new Deputy Head Academic, and Alexander Holden, our new Year 4 class teacher, and Toby King, our new Gap Year Teaching Assistant. I know they are all very much looking forward to meeting the children and getting to know them during these first few weeks of term.

Yesterday, you will have received a letter from Mike Windsor, regarding the government’s planned changes to VAT in regards to independent school fees and the school’s response. We appreciate that this is an unsettling time for our families and please do not hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any questions about this. There will be more detail to follow from Mr Windsor once our governing board has met again in September.

As I am sure you are aware, our form teachers will be speaking with you on zoom tomorrow evening to share key information about the year ahead and school routines which may be new for many of the children. You should receive the zoom links tomorrow morning which will enable you to dial in for these meetings.

The sports department are all set for lots of our Year 5-8s to join us on Cox’s Field on Saturday morning for their pre-season rugby session. If you have not signed up for this but would like your child to attend, please email [email protected] to let us know.

Please may I take this opportunity to encourage you to read the weekly mailing every Thursday as there is important information included. This week specifically, there is detailed information about drop off and pick up, as well as the start of other half activities.

We are really looking forward to welcoming all the children back to school on Tuesday morning and cannot wait to get started. I hope to catch up with many of you in the car park during the week or if not, at our welcome drinks event on Friday 6 September at 6.45pm.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head

Thursday 4 July 2024

Dear Parents

It is hard to believe that we have reached the end of another academic year.

This week seems to have been busier than almost any other this year and Pre-Prep have been busiest of all. Reception and Year 1 had a fantastic day at Cotswold Wildlife Park on Monday. The highlight seems to have been getting rather close to the lions, albeit they were behind the glass! Year 2 had a terrific day on Wednesday at The Earth Trust, further developing their love of the outdoors, forest school and nature. Add in a cycling and scooter session and a most enjoyable summer concert with everyone singing and numerous impressive instrumental solos from Year 2 children, and you can see what a busy and enjoyable week it has been for them.

The summer barbeque was greatly enjoyed by the pupils on Wednesday lunchtime. Our caterers did a great spread of burgers and hot dogs and it was clear that our children all rather enjoy a barbeque, so I imagine lots of you will be firing up the coals in the holiday weeks ahead.

Tomorrow, we say a fond farewell to our brilliant Year 8s, a number of whom have been with us since Reception. I am very much looking forward to prizegiving to celebrate their achievements, alongside their parents, on their final day at Abingdon Prep. They will be greatly missed.They too have had an exciting week with our keenest cricketers spending the day at Lord’s Cricket Ground, being shown around the playing facilities, the museum, the changing rooms and also having an indoor net session with some of their coaches. All Year 8s have been off today walking along a section of the Ridgeway, hopefully creating further memories of time spent with their friends. I know you will want to join with me in wishing them all the very best with their future endeavours.

All it leaves me to say is that I hope you all have a lovely summer holiday and we look forward to welcoming many of you back to school in September.

Best wishes

Craig Williams
Head