Welcome to the Tiffin School website. Tiffin is a unique, vibrant and exciting school, which inspires students to not only achieve academically, but to develop, as rounded individuals, their talents, skills, interests, personalities and whole character, enabling them to successfully progress in the wider world. Tiffin is a large, successful and extremely popular school, with approximately 1400 students including 500 in the Sixth Form. With the School being formed in Kingston in 1880, and its origins going back to the seventeenth century, Tiffin has a long history of providing a top class education. Although proud of our heritage, Tiffin is also a forward thinking, outward looking, and dynamic institution, aiming to prepare our students for their future lives in our modern society. Our change to a mixed Sixth Form, our move to individual student Chromebooks and use of Google Classroom, and our significant investment in premises and resources, are all indicative of our continual desire to further enrich, adapt and improve the educational environment and opportunities that Tiffin School can offer to its students.
The vision of the School is that we inspire students to engage, aspire and excel. The vision and aims of the School support their education in a selective and high achieving environment. Through constantly working to sustain an outstanding quality in our teaching and learning, we aim for our students to become confident independent learners who engage in their education. Coupled with this is the belief that the development of these young people is best achieved by fostering an engagement in a rich range of wider opportunities, allowing them to explore and develop all aspects of their characters, and become mature young adults. Throughout we encourage our students to aspire to high aims, and excel through their engagement, enabling them to go on to higher education and successful careers of their choice.
Tiffin is renowned for its academic success, and we strive for the highest of academic standards with our students. They can study a range of subjects that will allow them to follow a path of success that leads to the top universities and beyond. Our results are consistently outstanding, with an average over 3 years of approximately 85% of all GCSE grades at 9-7, and 90% of all A Level grades at A*-B. The new Government measure, Progress 8, also indicates that our students make outstanding progress between KS2 and GCSE. With 98% of our students going on to university, the vast majority to the top Russell Group universities, including about 25-30 each year to Oxbridge, the evidence of the success of the students in being able to pursue the courses and careers that they have wanted to follow, is clear. The Destinations on the website illustrates the range and variety of universities and courses that our students go on to in this country and abroad.
However, at Tiffin, we believe that education is about more than just academic success; it is also about developing the whole person, and we provide the opportunities and encouragement for students to engage in a quite extraordinary range of activities that will encourage and cultivate commitment, leadership, teamwork, initiative, responsibility and confidence. In particular, we invest in a breadth of curriculum that reflects our specialist interests in the Performing Arts, Languages and Sports, and we prepare them for the challenges of life in modern Britain with our fantastic tailored PSHE programme. What is learnt in a Tiffin education, are the skills for life, and the knowledge that learning goes beyond the classroom.
Our pupils enjoy Tiffin and the opportunities it offers, and their overall wellbeing is encouraged by our focus on developing empathy, generosity, and a respect for others in our community. We take pride in our principles of equality, and the respect and liberal tolerance we encourage for alternative views, cultures, and religions, and towards different people regardless of gender, disability, race, or sexual orientation. In addition, the school cares for and nurtures the young people that are here, supporting them in their social and moral development through our ethos and codes of behaviour, and of course doing all we can to protect and safeguard our students. In fact our unique Tiffin community embraces and includes the many parent groups that support the school in its wider opportunities, and we could not achieve a lot of what we do without the tremendous support we receive from our parents.
Tiffin has excellent facilities, but the continual development of the School facilities is an ongoing focus of the Board of Governors. In 2018 we opened a fantastic and substantial new building to accommodate a new dining hall and kitchens downstairs, with new classrooms and an IT suite on the first floor. This was built in the same style as our landmark Learning Resources Centre (2004), and was complemented by an impressive new pupil entrance, front boundary wall, and playground changes. In addition, we also opened in September 2022 an excellent new Sixth Form Centre, with study and social areas. In 2021 we opened a large new extension to our existing Sports Centre, creating new changing facilities as well as new fitness, weights and conditioning rooms, to complement our floodlit multi-use games area opened in 2009. These projects were completed not only after winning bids for Government funding, but also because of generous Parental and Alumni contributions to our fundraising campaigns. If you would like to find out more about our campaigns or make a donation, please follow this link to Fundraising.
Our investment at Tiffin is not just in facilities, but in our work in partnership with other schools in Kingston through our specialist interests and Academy status, and in the work we do with a wide range of community groups who use Tiffin School as their venue, or use our sports facilities in evenings and at weekends. Through our partnership with Kingston Rowing Club, we have refurbished our boathouse in Canbury Gardens, after successfully winning a large grant from British Rowing. We recognise our historical roots in the centre of Kingston and enjoy close collaboration with All Saints Parish Church, and The Tiffin Girls’ School.
The last 2 years has seen all schools having to deal with the consequences of the pandemic. Our existing use of Chromebooks meant that we were able to smoothly transition to online learning, broadly maintaining the school timetable with online lessons. In addition, we took the opportunity to re-think the way some things operated in schools, and introduced a number of very positive changes, such as different timings to the school day, and more convenient online parents’ evenings. Most of all, our priority in all things is always to keep our students safe.
Own or work here?
