Saturday Sparks

Our weekend sessions for local primary school pupils now offer coding and debate coaching alongside English and Maths.

The fun, free Saturday morning sessions are open to Year 5 pupils from neighbouring schools – a spring term programme we have been running for several years. This year, our teachers, Coder in Residence and Sixth Form student volunteers welcomed pupils from 11 different state primaries for English, Maths and coding sessions. Over the course of five weeks, 30 pupils enjoyed the opportunity to hone their skills in creative writing, code-cracking, logic puzzles, problem-solving, and poetry, eliciting positive feedback from parents. “She has thoroughly enjoyed these sessions and spoke very highly of the teachers… you have managed to run a really fun and challenging programme.” 

We have also introduced debate coaching for local pupils in Years 7 to 9 to help develop their skills of argumentation, with the aim of preparing them for debate contests.  These new Saturday Sparks sessions are part of our award-winning Debate Hub programme, which offers a fantastic array of resources for partner school teachers to build oracy skills for their own pupils, helping to make debating and public speaking as engaging and accessible as possible. Debate Hub is available free of charge to all our state partner schools and is funded entirely by generous donors and through proceeds from corporate training workshops.

Saturday Sparks sessions are just some of the many outreach and partnership activities we lead, which include teaching Art, Classics, Debating, Modern Languages, Music and Science at schools across London and beyond.