Welcome back everyone! We hope you all had a lovely summer break, and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone back in the library, enjoying all we have to offer in the 2026-27 academic year. Our team are ready and waiting to see you all, and to help you pick out books that you want and need, and hopefully something new to challenge and delight you. We’d like to welcome all our new students, especially the new year 7 cohort, and the new joiners in year 12.

What an incredible year of energy, team spirit, and fierce competition we have had for the 2025-26 House Competition!

From athletic prowess on the rounders field to the absolute concentration required for the classic egg and spoon race, not to mention the brilliant display of creativity in the Talent Show and the Christmas Card competition—it has been wonderful to see our students rewarded with house points for such a wide variety of talents.

A massive thank you to our new staff and student Heads of House for their fantastic support and leadership throughout the year!

How Was the Winner Decided?

Points were accumulated across a diverse mix of academic, behavioral, creative, and athletic challenges. Here are all the areas where students earned points for their houses this year:

• Academic & Behavioral: Most student recognitions, highest student attendance, and fewest behavior consequences.

• Creative & Performance: The Talent Show, House Writing Competition, and the Christmas Card Competition.

• Sports & Physical Activity: Sports Day, House Rounders, House Badminton, and the Sustain Run & Walk.

• Fun & Novelty Events: The Student Quiz, the classic Egg and Spoon Race, and the highly anticipated Staff Curling!

The Final Standings

With all of our new and traditional criteria taken into account, the competition was incredibly tight this year. Every single point was hard-earned. Here is how the leaderboard looks at the finish line:

A massive thank you to all the students, staff, and organizers who made these events such a spectacular success! Enjoy the victory, Nightingale, and to everyone else—rest up, because the journey to the next House Cup starts soon!

Some members of our year 12 history A level class went to meet the Wheathampstead u3a group on Wednesday afternoon, to discuss their experiences growing up in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

It was a wonderful occasion and lovely to see our sixth formers interacting with older members of the local community as well as learning from their experiences.

Thank you to the u3a group for inviting us.

Last Tuesday, KWS was buzzing with an extraordinary amount of energy, curiosity, and excitement as we welcomed eight classes of Year 5 pupils to our inaugural Taster Day. 

Transitioning to secondary school is a major milestone and our aim was to demystify the experience and replace any worries with genuine excitement.  We wanted to give these students a true sense of what makes our school community so vibrant and we are delighted to report that our visiting students rose to the occasion magnificently.

The students threw themselves into a variety of taster lessons, including:

• The Wonders of Science: pupils became real scientists conducting lots of experiments with a focus on colour, in our fully equipped laboratories.
• Creative Innovation: across music, dance, drama, art and DT the pupils got a taste of the specialised spaces and equipment they will use daily.
• Global Explorations: interactive challenges in the Humanities and modern foreign languages.

Character development is at the centre of all we do at KWS, and throughout the day it was incredibly rewarding to see the Year 5 students actively demonstrating our core values, most notably their:

• Bravery and Resilience: walking into a secondary school and facing unfamiliar people and spaces can be daunting. Year 5 showed immense grit, stepping outside their comfort zones and tackling every new challenge with a smile.
• Collaboration and Curiosity: our staff were blown away by the engagement of the students and the great questions they asked. Their desire to explore, investigate, and understand how things work was a joy to watch.

KWS students involved in this day showed off a great many of our Character traits too – from the fantastic bunch of Year 7 and 8 student leaders who were tour guides for the day for their old primary schools (and fielded so many questions from Year 5s) to our Year 12 Subject Student Ambassadors helping run the taster lessons. 

A big thank you to the primary school staff who brought their classes along and the KWS staff team for putting on such a fantastic array of lessons.  We look forward to making this an annual KWS event.