Sompting Abbotts Preparatory School is an independent school in Sussex with 30 acres of beautiful grounds used as an extensive 'outdoor classroom'
Sompting Abbotts Preparatory School is a Sussex private school with enviable facilities. The parkland estate means our children have ample opportunity for play, discovery and learning. And to let off steam.
We use our great green space as a rich teaching resource. We encourage pupils to make a connection with the natural world and get involved with the local flora and fauna.
Fly with us! Aerial tour of Sompting Abbotts Prep School. Click to play video below
Outdoor learning spaces
Victorian greenhouses used for Gardening Club and for growing fresh vegetables for school lunches at Sompting Abbotts
We've a wild pond and woodland areas for forest school-style activities. The estate includes rose gardens, fields where horses graze, and open grassland. Children at Sompting Abbotts get to be real children: to fill their lungs with fresh air, collect conkers, throw Autumn leaves up in the air, and scoop up frogspawn.
For sports, we have excellent grass playing pitches for rugby, cricket and soccer; tennis, five-a-side and netball courts, and a heated swimming pool. For our Early Years children, there's a safe walled garden with sandpit and adventure play equipment. A well-equipped gymnasium is used for indoor PE.
Enhanced learning
Our main school is a three-storey Neo-Gothic building. Many classroom windows face south with wonderful views of the English Channel. The school houses the library, music rooms, SEN room, refectory, assembly hall, language lab, IT suite and kitchens. Some fresh food for school meals is grown by the children in our vegetable plots and Victorian greenhouses.
The Early Years and Pre-Prep classrooms are housed in the Stables block (originally Sompting Abbotts' old coach house). A purpose-built art studio, cookery room, gymnasium and science lab are located here.
“Cows hibernate in winter, grey squirrels are native to this country, conkers come from oak (or maybe beech, or is it fir?) trees, and of course there’s no such thing as a leaf that can soothe a nettle sting. Or so, according to a new survey, believe between a quarter and a half of all British children! Not the children at our West Sussex independent school Sompting Abbotts however. Here, we see Nature as a tool to get children to experience not just the wider world, but themselves. ”
Salad for lunch: fresh tomatoes from the school greenhouses
“ My children can identify sparrow hawks and buzzards. They know the sound of a song thrush and blackbirds. The fact that the children can grow their own vegetables and eat them for lunch is not on many schools’ curriculums. I want my children to experience so much more than academia. Here they do.”
What will we spot today?
Pre-Prep children enjoy a weekly forest school-style excursion and the Main School uses the grounds for all kinds of nature discovery and field learning
Watch this space ...
Walk through the parkland estate of West Sussex independent school Sompting Abbotts and you might well hear the tap-tap of the greater spotted woodpecker!
The grounds constitute an open-air classroom we use year-round. Children get fully immersed in the change of seasons and plenty of opportunities for wildlife spotting. Be it squirrels, rabbits, foxes, voles, bats or badgers. Or buzzards, corn bunting, skylark, lapwing or birds of prey. Or wildflowers such as Devil's Bit Scabious, Scarlet Pimpernel or the rare Burnt Orchid.
Our wild pond is an exciting wetland habitat too for science studies and to encounter water boatmen, dragonflies, newts and frogs.
Learning about nature is part of everyday life at Sompting Abbotts Preparatory School, where we strongly support the ethos of the Forest School movement. The school uses its 30 acres of grounds, mature woodland, conservation ponds and wild areas as one big outdoor classroom that is adapted to nature, science, art and many other Forest-School-style lessons.
The cricket pitch
The heated swimming pool
The tennis and netball courts
The Early Years walled garden
What child doesn’t love to collect handfuls of glossy brown conkers? At Sompting Abbotts, they don't just fill their pockets — even socks become makeshift pouches. And so, at this time of the year, we send the children out into our school grounds to look for shiny conkers (not that they need any persuading).