Creativity at Newlands

Children learn best, and remain motivated if they are engaged and if they have creative ownership of work that is made relevant to them. More...

Why choose Newlands?

Newlands in under 60 seconds - take a quick glance at what makes learning at Newlands so unique... More...

History of the School

The school first started as a tutorial in 1814 at Hatfield House, home of The Marquis of Salisbury. More...

The Future of Education

Last month I went to the Education show at the NEC in Birmingham.   With the school’s focus on creativity and its continuing investment in Digital technology in mind, I was keen to see what new developments there are in software and hardware to enhance teaching and learning.  What I found was very disappointing. More...

Dakota plays Franky in E4's 'Skins'

Many of you will know that Dakota Blue Richards was a pupil at Newlands until she completed her GCSEs last summer (gaining 12 passes, mostly A*s, As and Bs) We deliberately kept very quiet about Dakota’s parallel film and television career and many of you will have seen the film version of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (published as Northern Lights in the UK) without realising that Dakota was playing Lyra, the lead character. Dakota dealt with all the attention and publicity in a very sensible way and she was able to switch back into being a normal member of the Newlands community with apparent ease.   I will always remember hearing one conversation where several girls were discussing what they had done at the weekend. More...

Brain Training

*Does Brain Training Really Work?*   You may have seen the adverts – Helen Mirren playing on the Wii or Julie Walters having a go at the Nintendo. The latest buzz about video gaming is that it can help users protect against memory loss in later life.   These fun and relatively simple to use games - involve players doing mental arithmetic tasks as well as language tests and memory puzzles. More...

Software and a money saving tip

One of the main areas of investment at Newlands has been in ‘Industry Standard’ software.   It is an important element of our students’ preparations for their future lives that they are familiar with the software that they will encounter in their careers.   All our students from Year 7 upwards are taught how to use Adobe Photoshop for image manipulation, principally for use in their Art and ICT work, but often for other subjects too. More...

Can Anyone Learn to Draw?

The “natural born artist” is a myth. Even the best of them needed the motivation and desire as well as the training and time. And even non-visual thinkers can, with perceptual training techniques, vastly improve their visual mental skills as well as their hand-eye or digital abilities. More...