Cambridge Prep Schools

[tabitha80]

We're considering St. John's College School and King's College for our children. I have read comments on this site and others about the two schools, and, from what I gather, the pastoral care at St. John's is excellent. But apart from pastoral care, are there other significant differences between St. John's and King's? Is one stronger academically than the other? Or are they more or less equal in terms of academics and sports?

My DCs are at St John's - as far as I can tell whatever your child "is" they will bring it out of them - e.g. if they are sporty, academic, musical, arty - then they have the staff & facilities to develop those skills.

St John's are also very into learning soft skills for life - so they learn mindfulness, compassion, philosophy - which I love.

Have you been round to have a look at the schools yet? Feel free to PM if you have specific questions.

I want to borrow tabitha80’s thread to ask a similar question as well. We are also considering St John’s CS and King’s CS for our DS. Heard many good things about these two schools and have seen some treads on Mumsnet back a couple of years ago. Overall, it seems that St John’s is more academic prone and King’s seem to have a more well-rounded curriculum. King’s is also more focused on music. To be honest, it’s really too early for us to tell whether our DS would be more towards music or academic. He is a little bit shy but he likes to try different things and seem to have a broad interest on many different things. What makes us struggle to decide is that if he doesn't really like music, maybe he would feel left out in Kings if all the kids around him are good in music. But we also think that even if he doesn't like music, in King’s environment, he would probably still pick up an instrument as a hobby since he would have influence from his peers. It seems that King’s had a very strong year (2014) in terms of school leavers compared to St John’s.

At the meantime, we heard a lot of good things about St John’s especially its academic performance. We had a chance to visit the school and were really impressed by the facility there and the students (we haven’t had a chance to visit Kings though so not sure what it looks like). The pastoral care seems really nice too. We are probably more keen to St John’s , but we are a bit concerned that we have heard that parents from St John’s are from very well off backgrounds but both of us are young professionals who just started our careers not long ago. We think that the environment in King’s would probably be more suitable to DS.

I know that there are already a lot of threads available in this site discussing independent preps in Cambridge but quite a lot of them seem to be dated a while back. Given that King’s has just received their new ISI report in Dec 2014 (the one they had previously was not very impressive compared to other independent preps in Cambridge), I was hoping to hear if there is any more recent experience/insights about these two schools. Many thanks in advance.(PS: thanks to DyeInTheEar for your reply which is really helpful).