Message from the Headteacher Dr M N F Baxter
Welcome to Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys. We are a school community of nearly 1000 students and staff set in the Kent countryside on the outskirts of the medieval city of Canterbury. We enjoy a high reputation locally and nationally as a school with an enviable academic record consequent upon inspirational teaching and top quality pastoral care. We also consider ourselves to be in the vanguard of English schools developing a ‘futures’ strategy and applying innovative approaches to teaching and learning.
Our students join us in Year 7 from all over East Kent and the overwhelming majority ultimately progress to take up places at the better universities, both at home and abroad. Our alumni have gone on to play leading roles in the arts and sciences, in the military, in politics and in the professions around the world. Our A level results show us to be one of the most successful boys’ schools in the country. We admit girls into the Sixth Form and their results are equally impressive.
We enjoy a reputation for humanity and strive to maintain high quality relationships between staff and students at all levels of the school. Pastoral care is given a high profile and is backed up by professional agencies, aiming both to bring about effective learning and to support the emotional and spiritual development of all our students. The result of this is a caring and happy community, offering leadership and team based opportunities to all our students.
Our curriculum is designed to put learning firmly at the centre of all that we do and the academic staff have used their expertise to produce a set of principles for high quality, effective teaching to which they all adhere. Whilst we a specialist Science school, we remain confident that our strengths range across the wide variety of disciplines that we offer, from Theatre Studies and Philosophy to Economics and Music. The unusually high qualifications of the teaching staff and their commitment to professional development and further academic study, as well as the impressive work of the support staff, mean that standards are maintained at a very high level.
So what of the future? Our strategic plan is long term and ‘futures’ based so that we consider closely the world that we are ultimately preparing our students for and the skills they will need to live and survive in that world. The twenty-first century will provide many challenges for young people. Our aim is to shape lifelong learners, critical and innovative thinkers who will thrive in the acceptance of those challenges and whose moral integrity will enable them to determine a better world for all.
Dr M N F Baxter, Headteacher