We are excited to be opening our IDEAS Hub in the Summer of 2024. This ambitious, new building facilitates the outstanding education we provide, which will prepare our students as future leaders, at the forefront of innovative thinking. NLCS students are self-assured, ambitious, and love a challenge: the IDEAS Hub will encourage our students to engage with problems across academic disciplines, with a keen sense of social and moral responsibility.  

Through our business partnerships we give students an understanding of the breadth and wealth of career opportunities available to them, whether through mentored projects or career-based workshops. Inspirational role models are key to unlocking students’ ambitions.  

Giving back to the community is a cornerstone of our ethos and will also be a significant aspect of our IDEAS Hub. Inviting local schools in to co-compete in academic competitions will enrich all students’ experience and emphasise the importance of collaboration. Our students will also lead clubs and projects for younger students, in disciplines such as Latin, Music, Modern Foreign Languages, and Maths, as well as cross-curricular projects such as Mini MUN and Mini F1 in Schools.  

The foundations for a holistic education which allows students to really thrive in every area of adult life are set long before they start in Year 7. Our Junior School pupils will experience cross-curricular activities such as their STEAM Days in the Atrium of the IDEAS Hub, inspired by the work of Senior School students which will be exhibited all around them.  

Whether our students lead with dedication from the front or through committed work in crucial world-changing fields, we support and encourage them to find their niche.  

View a short video below about The IDEAS Hub that was created as part of our 2024 Giving Day campaign.

KEY DESIGN FEATURES

ATRIUM: The Atrium will provide a space for collaboration and active learning. As disciplines and industries are developing, traditional boundaries are blurring, making collaboration crucial for innovation. As a school known for pioneering girls’ education we must ensure that our provision inspires and strengthens self-motivated, cutting-edge projects, whether scientific, ecological, literary, or historical in nature, or everywhere in between. The Atrium will facilitate active learning opportunities not possible in the traditional classroom, for example to act scenes from English texts to encourage deeper, more empathetic insights, or to investigate physical phenomena such as gravitational force in Maths, Geography, and Physics.

The versatile exhibition space in the Atrium will allow students to display their work across all subjects and extra-curricular activities, inspiring other students to take on challenges and opportunities themselves. Students can exhibit pit displays for their F1 in Schools teams and Young Enterprise companies, and departments can book the space to work with their students on creating academically focused and enriching exhibitions for the school.

The Atrium will also allow our staff and students to run ambitious partnership events for students in local primary and secondary schools: for example, a series of workshops exploring music, languages, and problem solving. It will  facilitate collaboration between teachers from different departments and different schools; we will host conferences for teacher training and teacher enrichment, and become a hub for London teachers who wish to develop their practice in a number of areas.

MAKE SPACE: The Make Space is a smaller, but equally adaptable room with resources for crafting and prototyping and can be used across disciplines, such as for costume design in Drama or for historical clay-work in Latin lessons. It will facilitate creative group work and feature a green screen, along with video and audio recording equipment for students to produce podcasts, movies and shows.

DESIGN SUITES AND WORKSHOPS: These spaces will be ideal for students to design and manufacture prototypes that bring learning to life. For example, students may use this space and equipment to both design and build out a prosthetic limb for an amputee, a water filtration system for a rural village in a developing country, or period clothing for a Shakespearean play held in the Atrium.