Principal's Welcome

Welcome to Stamford

"Stamford is a happy, welcoming and successful school. Our students leave Stamford as rounded and grounded young people, ready for life beyond education."

Welcome to Stamford. I am Will Phelan, the Principal of Stamford Schools. I am an educationalist and, in a non-education environment, I would be the CEO. I am responsible for the overall strategic direction of Stamford Schools, along with our Governing Body, ensuring that we offer the very best education and experience we possibly can for our students right now, whilst future-proofing our Schools and maintaining our relationship with the wider Stamford community.

Across Stamford Schools, our strategy is to focus on academic ambition, pastoral excellence, and delivering world-class preparation for the future, whilst continually evolving to meet the needs of our students. My role is to ensure the education we offer equips the children of the next century; for children of the twenty-first century to flourish and become capable adults, quite simply the schools that got us here won’t get them there.

In his book '21 Lessons For The 21st Century', Noah Harari explores what it means to be human in an age of bewilderment. 21st century children need to be taught how to make sense of the vast amount of information that bombards them on a daily basis. They need to learn how to distinguish between important information and irrelevant, or downright fake, news.

In the 21st century, information will be always at our fingertips. The truth, however, will be harder to find.

That is our challenge as schools, and that is one small part of what we aim to do here at Stamford. We aim to create, in partnership with you, autonomous adults ready to take their place and not just survive but thrive in the future.

Will Phelan
Principal, Stamford Schools

Our Aim

Our aim at Stamford is to give young people the opportunities to thrive. Why? To help them become the best version of themselves.

We do this by developing in our students the ability to be aspirational and to think for themselves. We teach them to embrace innovation and to find fulfilment through their friendships, families and relationships. Respect and inclusivity are key factors to us at Stamford; we teach students to be bold and resilient, ready to take their next steps in the world.

Stamfordian Values

Our three values at Stamford are what we call Team, Fire, Spirit:

Team is about building the right team around each student. This is not just the teachers and the pastoral team, but a variety of the right people in our support staff, as well as buddies, mentors and friendship groups. That support network is different for every single student, and we put a lot of time and effort into making sure we get it right. It is also about parents who are very much part of the Stamford team.

When we talk about Fire, we are talking about William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, it is the lighting of a fire”. At Stamford we believe it is our core role to do that; to excite our students about their world. Igniting that spark and helping every single child to find the things that really excite them. We genuinely do not care if it’s physics or woodworking, hockey or chess – whatever it is, it’s our job to help them to discover it, and then to make sure they have the support, facilities and resources they need to pursue it as far and as high as they want to.

Spirit is our way of saying that we really value individuality, character, and personality. Stamfordians are unique, with a unique spirit which purveys every part of the school.

The structure of our Schools means that although on paper we are a large school, day to day every student is known and understood as individuals in each of our Schools.

Academically at Stamford we are a broad church. No school can be all things to all people, yet we know what kind of children will thrive at Stamford. Each year we send the majority of our students to elite universities, however, we spend time helping ALL students to follow their own individual pathway which may well be university, but equally it could be an apprenticeship in something they are passionate about, or something else altogether. At Stamford, we are committed to giving our students the tools and support they need to end up happy and successful by their own measure, not by ours.

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