Facilities

The Gower School takes great pride in our excellent facilities. Our main focus is with safety of the children and staff, as well as an enjoyable learning and working environment for all. We make sure our rooms are accessible for children with different abilities and we change or develop classrooms when needed to fit the needs of the children we are catering for. We have wheelchair access at both of our sites. Our furniture is fitted for different ages and sizes and our rooms are light and airy. Our teachers use smart screens where appropriate as well as projectors and audio equipment. We have recently extended our primary school by acquiring new space as our school has grown.

Nursery

At 18 North Road we have six classrooms on two floors as well as a medical room/quiet room, milk kitchen in the baby room, nappy changing area on each floor, separate toilets for children and adults on each floor as well as an accessible toilet on the ground floor. We also have an office, a staffroom and laundry facilities. There are covered decking areas on both floors for free flow where block play is available for the children. There is a large garden space including a climbing area, role play area, two garden houses, digging/mud play area, mud kitchen, herb garden, bicycle track, sand and water play area and decking area for Les Nounours (babies). We also have a dedicated space for tricycles, bicycles, scooters and helmets in the garden and pushchair storage in the front.

At 28 North Road there are two classrooms on the ground floor as well as a multipurpose hall, a library, a five star kitchen (Environmental Health, February 2020) catering both sites, nappy changing area, separate toilets for children and adults as well as an accessible toilet. We also have the office in the front, a computer room/meeting room at the back and a laundry room. There are outdoor spaces with retractable awnings in each room for free flow where block play is available for the children. There is a dedicated space for tricycles, bicycles, scooters and helmets in the garden and pushchair storage in the front.

Montessori Classrooms

Our nursery currently has eight nursery rooms for different age groups from three months to four and a half years on our two sites across the road from each other. All of our classrooms are equipped with Community Playthings furniture. The rooms have a variety of educational areas for the groups, such as a book corner, Practical Life Skills area, sensorial area, Understanding the World area, Mathematical area and Literacy area.

Experiences outside Nursery

Our children also regularly visit venues outside the school such as the Caledonian Park play area, Penn Road Gardens, John Barnes library, the Pleasance and Little Angel Theatre, London Zoo, Culpeper Gardens, Barnsbury Woods, Camley Street Gardens, the London Symphony Orchestra at St Luke’s Church, Wigmore Hall and the Science Museum.

Primary

At our independent primary school we have classrooms for ten classes. Many of our classrooms have outdoor space, including a garden for our Foundation Stage classroom, an outdoor terrace outside our first floor Lower School classroom, and a spacious rooftop deck on the top floor. We have separate toilet facilities on all floors for children and adults. Several of our classrooms also have a quiet learning room which is used for 1:1 language lessons and additional study.

We have two multipurpose halls which are used daily for assemblies, school meals from our kitchen, sports PE and games, class performances, music, dance, yoga and after school clubs to name a few. As many of our children take individual music lessons at the school, we have four pianos in 1:1 teaching rooms to cater for this, one of them being in our dedicated music room. We have a medical room for short-term care of sick or injured children. The school has a well-equipped library for readers of all levels.

Each classroom is equipped with computers, iPads and a Clevertouch interactive screen, as well as two banks of laptops. We have a dedicated art room where children create and store their masterpieces-in-progress. The science room has an array of visual aids and resources for our children. To promote environmental sustainability, our school is partially powered by solar panels which are installed on the roof of our tallest building. We also have a staffroom and an office. 

Sports Facilities

In addition to our school halls, we use brilliant local facilities for sports such as Market Road for football and tennis, Cally Pool and Ironmonger Row Baths for swimming, and the courts on Highbury Fields for rugby and netball. We use dance studios at Lift on White Lion Street. The children have their break time at Grimaldi Park, which hosts an excellent children’s play area. Our annual Summer and Carol Concerts take place at St Silas Church, which is close by.

London as a Classroom

The groups also visit a range of museums, galleries and concert halls each term, including the British Museum, the British Library, the Museum of London, the Barbican and the Little Angel Theatre. Children from Form Three upwards attend overnight visits to places of interest such as Dinosnores at the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and even have slept overnight on the Golden Hinde ship! We arrange an annual residential trip for our Forms Four, Five and Six classes with the Bushcraft company, where the children camp for one nights in the woods, and enjoy many Bushcraft outdoor activities throughout their two-day trip.