Why Cambridge for Your Child's Schooling?

I'm blessed to have three children and I’m very comfortable with my 14-year-old daughter getting the bus into Cambridge by herself. I spent 17 years working in London and if we were still living there, I wouldn't have been as happy for her to do that.  And that's important, because if children are to develop social intelligence and social connection, they need agency and freedom, beyond that which is provided by a parent making all of the arrangements for them.

Cambridge is a city steeped in academic excellence and cultural heritage and there is a real blend of opportunity and learning and high standards and expectations within the community.

It’s an inspiring place for young people to grow up. In its historic buildings key scientific breakthroughs have been made through the years and, today, it is attracting significant global investment and people are working at the cutting edge of science, medicine and technology. It’s also a place where ideas and innovations spin out from the world-renowned university, creating a community of high growth start-up and scale-up companies and a richly varied job market. In this city of huge opportunity we are fortunate to be positioned at the heart of the community. 

Many of our students are the children of members of the business, science, medical and education industries and are growing up in homes where there is excitement about the future, where there is a sense of the possible and, crucially, where there is a belief in the importance of education as a tool to achieve and to make one’s mark In the world.

There are people who move to Cambridge from all over the world and take up places in either the university or in business. It’s an academic and cultural melting pot, attracting bright minds from all over the world and our school community is reflective of this, creating an environment where both our day and boarding students from all over the world come together to learn and grow.

And so Cambridge has that diversity of experience, of background, of language, of cultural perspective, but it's also a close knit community, because people are brought together by a common purpose to drive forward the bounds of understanding of how technology can be harnessed to improve the world. Likewise families are brought together by the community of our school.

There are lots of common values within our school and within this community that are nurtured to help students and their families to feel like they belong. A strong facet of our school is ensuring children have a real sense of belonging at Stephen Perse Cambridge and as members of the wider Cambridge community. Within that community lifelong friendships are formed, not just amongst the children, but also among their families and indeed among our staff.

Just before the end of the Autumn term, I did some mock interviews with a number of our students preparing for university application, and I was blown away by how much opportunity they were able to reflect upon from their time in Cambridge, in terms of visiting museums and cultural spaces, attending lectures on anything from economic theory to classics, doing industry work experience, conversations at the family dinner table, and so on. Many of these experiences and opportunities are only open to our students because members of the school community, both academic staff and parents, benefit from a close-at-hand, illustrious network, with myriad connections, which create boundless opportunities for our students.

Why choose a city school?

Country boarding schools provide a very different set of opportunities for young people, and those opportunities might be attractive to families.  For example, the large green spaces and perhaps a degree of safety provided by a small, closed community. But, in turn, this can lead to a sense of isolation for students and obstacles in connecting and accessing the real world.

Our location, right in the heart of Cambridge (where there are, incidentally, plenty of large green spaces), means students have access to the plethora of opportunities right on their doorstep.  We don’t need to make elaborate travel plans to visit places or experience things; our students have almost limitless interaction opportunities, from the Botanic Gardens to the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Scott Polar Research Institute, which our staff build into each half term.  In this way, Cambridge is infused through our curriculum.

We are also spoilt for choice in Cambridge for inspiring expert speakers and role models for our students to learn from.  Our outreach to the local community to find a guest speaker to provide a unique perspective on topics like philosophy, history or geography has resulted in students hearing from academics, museum curators, the Director of BBC iPlayer and environmental scientists to name a few, who are part of our shared community, as well as being at the top of their fields.

It’s so important for children, from an early age, to experience things and people who help them to understand what they’re learning in the classroom and why, and who inspire them to be inquisitive beyond the strictures of the national curriculum.  We want them to think “here's somebody who's really interesting to listen to, who's devoted their life to their subject, who really understands it, and actually is doing something really interesting with it. So, this is a subject I really want to understand better and learn more about”. This intellectual curiosity isn’t just the bedrock upon which Oxbridge and other top universities admissions decisions are founded. It is also the starting point for a purposeful, interesting, fulfilling and rewarding career and life beyond school.

What about the arts?

For students interested in performing arts, from an amateur perspective to semi professional and beyond, there’s a whole host of opportunities in Cambridge, with wonderful theaters and concert halls in and around the city, and huge programs of theatrical and musical performances.

Our students perform in Cambridge University college chapels, local churches and West Road Concert Hall.  We also go much further afield; for example, last summer the school’s orchestra and choir went to Berlin on a joint tour.

While we have a considerable number of students who have achieved their grade eight and are regular concert level performers, we also have many students for whom learning an instrument, and gaining previous experience of performance in front of an audience is a really important part of their educational and personal journey. They might not wish to be top level, concert level performers, but the experience of having to prepare a piece of music, speech or monologue or a piece of poetry for performance offers them an opportunity to practise memorisation skills, oracy and build their confidence in front of an audience to ensure successful future presentations.

What about sports?

We have state-of-the-art sports and gymnastics facilities on site, as well as access to playing fields and, of course, the river Cam for rowing.  We compete on a national level in sports like netball and regularly win regional tournaments in hockey and football.  Our sporting alumni make inspiring role models for our students and we recently had a visit from Olympic Rower and alumna Imogen Grant, who was also recognised in the 2025 New Year’s Honours list, receiving an MBE.

Sport has to start by being inclusive, and that's definitely the first focus for us here.  Everyone gets a chance to play sport and they’ll get the chance to play in competitive fixtures, but the purpose of playing sport is not to win matches; it's to develop tenacity, resilience, team spirit and sportsmanship. We take a metacognitive approach to the coaching of sport that helps the students to step back and say “yes, I might be learning how to shoot or pass in netball, but what I'm actually learning is how to play my part in improving the performance of a team, how to communicate with my teammates, how to develop skills of reflection and continuous self-improvement.”

Overseas families

Cambridge is a great place to spend two years as a sixth form student. There are a relatively small number of opportunities for boarding in a place like Cambridge and, because it is such a safe city, parents can feel reassured that they're not sending their son or daughter to a place which is rife with risk. This environment enables us to offer a university style experience, unlike a traditional boarding school, which gives students a lot more freedom of time and choice, with opportunities to visit other cities like London in a safe way.

We host and run the Model United Nations Annual Conference at our sixth form and students from all over the world join in, travelling to and staying with us in Cambridge.

Our international students enjoy being able to access the international cuisine in restaurants and foods they’re familiar with in shops across a city that caters to, and represents, a global community.

It’s very important to us that every child who joins the school integrates well and is able to create or join groups of students that are like minded or interested in similar things, so that they have that all-important sense of belonging right from the outset. We assess this carefully through our selection process and make sure that our school and Cambridge is going to be a good fit for every child.