Thinking
By Richard Queripel, Head of Junior School
The parents drawn to NLCS tend to know exactly what they are looking for. Whether I meet them at an admissions event, in the playground or at parents’ evening, it is clear that they want their daughters to be happy, challenged and themselves.
Happiness and challenge are things I see in our classrooms every single day, and together they have a name: joyful scholarship. Alison Gopnik, one of the world’s leading developmental psychologists, puts it simply: the best education is gardening, not carpentry – creating the conditions for children to grow, rather than shaping them to a predetermined design. That image resonates, because it describes exactly what we want every day at NLCS to feel like.
When I talk about scholarship in the Junior School, I don’t mean pressure dressed up as academics. What I mean is something altogether more alive: the Year 3 girl who starts a lesson on forces and ends up ten minutes deep in an unplanned conversation about black holes, which nobody wants to stop. The Year 6 girl whose independent research project goes somewhere nobody predicted when she follows her own curiosity. A mind, in short, that finds the world endlessly interesting and has been given the confidence to pursue that interest wherever it leads.
One of the most important things we can give a child is comfort with uncertainty. Not the anxiety of not knowing, but the excitement of it. Our Year 5 pupils have been experiencing exactly this through their VEX GO robotics journey. They built, they failed, they redesigned and they competed. At no point did they know whether their solution would work, but that uncertainty was not a source of anxiety. It was, quite deliberately, the point. Watching a group of ten-year-olds troubleshoot a problem they have never encountered before, with focus, good humour and determination, is one of the best things you can witness in a school.
The children who thrive most brilliantly as learners are, almost without exception, the ones who are also having the most fun. When a child is joyful, she is braver. She asks the question she is not quite sure about, makes the mistake and tries again, takes the creative risk. This is why performance, creativity and laughter are not the opposite of scholarship here. They are the conditions in which it flourishes. Our Lower School Poetry Recital Competition this term was a perfect illustration: girls performing John Agard, Michael Rosen and Joan Poulson with humour, poise and comic timing, giving something of themselves to an audience with confidence.
Joyful scholarship looks different depending on the day. On International Women’s Day, our Year 3 girls sat with a visitor from the RAF Museum and unpacked the stories of inspirational women that history had chosen to overlook, before committing to making sure those stories were told. On our Outdoor STEAM Day, those same girls and their peers were outside building marble runs, dropping eggs from height and building thermometers, completely absorbed and entirely unbothered by the not-so-joyful weather. The subject matter could not be more different. But in both activities, the girls were exactly the same: present, engrossed and entirely their own. This is precisely what joyful scholarship looks like when it is working.
A school that genuinely rejects the hothouse model has to be serious about protecting the inner life of its pupils. Academic ambition without that is simply pressure with a good vocabulary. Children who feel safe, curious and settled learn better. That is not a soft instinct. It is what the evidence consistently shows, and it is the foundation on which everything else here is built. The best preparation for a brilliant academic future is not early pressure, it is early love of learning.
We take academic ambition very seriously at NLCS Junior School, setting students up for their future in the Senior School where they go on to achieve extraordinary results in public examinations, external competitions and beyond. But we are just as serious about the kind of humans we are nurturing, and we know that creativity and joy are not extras. They are the substance of a genuinely excellent education. Nothing I have written here will tell you as much as a morning spent with us. Come and find out for yourself.
