Longsands Academy

Longsands Academy

Longsands Academy, part of the Astrea Academy Trust, is a successful, fully inclusive secondary school serving the community of St Neots and its surrounding area. We pride ourselves on providing an engaging, purposeful and supportive environment in which all of our students feel empowered to reach and embrace their full potential with confidence and become responsible, well rounded citizens.

A Welcome from our Director for Secondary Education

Longsands is brimming with potential.  The academy is at the heart of the community and has pledged to provide a rich, broad and varied education to all the pupils it serves. The academy and Trust are committed to a knowledge-rich curriculum and a traditional approach to teaching, behaviour and culture, influenced by Lemov’s Teach Like A Champion and Tom Bennett. We believe that schools must teach powerful knowledge, ’the best that has been thought and said’ and an ‘entitlement curriculum’ for all, with an underpinning philosophy that ‘education for all should confer the benefits associated with education for the rich’ (Michael Young).

We have recently launched the Astrea behaviour curriculum, where behaviour expectations and routines are explicitly taught and deliberately practised. The creation of a scholarly culture that is warm and strict, disciplined and joyful, where there is ‘purpose not power’, ensuring impeccable behaviour, where teachers can focus on teaching and pupils can focus on learning, underpins everything.

Longsands Academy is part of Astrea Academy Trust and since joining the Trust in 2018 has developed a strong curriculum, good teaching and effective pupil support.   If you are aligned to our mission and values, have a strong track record of improving young people’s education and a drive to do more, we very much look forward to hearing from you. We fully recommend that you take the opportunity to make an informal visit prior to making your application to see the school for yourself.

With best wishes,

Richard Tutt

Director for Secondary Education

Values and vision

The curriculum, at Longsands Academy, is defined as ‘the knowledge, skills & values students are expected to learn, the units and lessons that are taught, the planned sequence of instruction, the resources used to support teaching and the assessments used to evaluate learning’.

At Longsands Academy, our curriculum is designed to fulfil our core purpose which aims to secure the best possible experience, learning and outcomes for each young person for whom we have responsibility. As such, we believe that students are entitled to be immersed in ‘the best that has been thought and said’ which is best achieved through a broad and balanced, knowledge-rich curriculum and a strong personal development programme. In addition, our provision is tailored so that all students, whatever their background and ability, can follow suitable pathways, from Years 7 through to Year 13, which maximise their chances to progress their learning and achieve academic excellence and success in public examinations, as well as promoting emotional wellbeing and mental health, enabling them to successfully access the next chapter of their lives.

Our commitment to promoting an ethos of learning for life and work throughout all aspects of the Academy as well as our provision of a wide range of extra-curricular and personal development opportunities aims to instil our core values in students, including care and respect for self and others, honesty, creativity, clear and open communication, high aspirations and the determination to fulfil them and strong relationships and shared goals achieved through teamwork.

Find out more here - Longsands Prospectus