ep. 64 Profile: Learning Support

In this episode, we visit the school on its Multicultural Day - a day where students share food, dances and clothes that reflect their cultural heritage.

In this episode, we sit down with Stuart Bird, Rachel Lawson (Outreach and Partnerships Team) and a selection of student volunteers to tell us about the Surbiton High School Community Bank in Kingston. We learn about how donations are collected sorted and given to people in society who need them most.

In this episode, we sit down with Principal Matthew Shoults and talk about how and why Surbiton High School became involved in the UAUK scheme, and how we feel our community benefits by being host to a dozen Ukrainian students.

In this episode, we sit down with a dozen students from Ukraine who visited us in November 2025 as part of the UAUK student visitor scheme. This saw students live with host families in our communities and attend lessons and activities at Surbiton High School for a fortnight. We hear about their experiences on this trip, including: eating British and international food, sight-seeing around London, visiting the Houses of Parliament and meeting Sir Keir Starmer PM.

In this episode, we sit down with Dionne King the Head of Learning Support (SENCO). We learn about how our specialist team works with SEN and EAL students to support their learning from Year 7 all the way through to Year 13.

In this episode, we sit down with Jonny Gall, Head of Hockey at Surbiton High School and talk about what makes our hockey offering particularly special: what is special about our staff, how do we schedule training for our students, and how have our hockey teams been performing this last season?

In this episode, we sit down with author and alumnus, Jacob North. While at Surbiton high school, Jacob was mentored by Stuart Bird our Writer in Residence and Deputy Head of English. A decade later, Jacob has his first book out, ‘Ice Apprentices’ and is working on his follow-up in the series as well as other projects. Reunited after a decade, Stuart and Jacob talk about the writing process and the journey of publishing a novel.

In this episode, we sit down with Polly Rumbold, Head of Development, Alumni Relations and Whole School Events, and talk about celebrating our 141st Founders’ Day. We talk about our church service at St Mark’s Church, our hymns, the traditional iced buns and the importance of marking Founders’ Day each year.

In this episode of the podcast, we sit down with Surbiton High School’s new Principal, Matthew Shoults. We get to know a bit about his background, what brought him into teaching, his first impressions of Surbiton High School and his thoughts on what makes a worthwhile 21st century education.

In this episode, we sit down with the senior school librarian, Joe Humphreys, and we talk about one of our new charity focuses for the next few years: The Cold Feet Foundation, Nepal. The goal of this charitable endeavour is to support a school that has very little to its name. In the episode, Joe describes the lack of funding, lack of resources, and lack of suitable space for teaching & learning, including classrooms with mould growing up the walls and holes in the floor, a library with no books and a budget of 15p a day per person to feed hundreds of students. Joe has travelled to over 40 countries in his lifetime and often spends time volunteering when he travels. His connection to Nepal is a personal one and he speaks very movingly about why this is a worthwhile charity to support.