Bilingual Education

Our Approach

At Kensington Wade we believe that schools have a responsibility to equip children with the skills, knowledge, cultural understanding and empathy they will need to play their part in an interconnected world – a world where China will play an ever-increasing role.

Kensington Wade’s pupils have a huge advantage. In addition to receiving a first class prep school education, they will leave us fully able to speak, understand, read and write Chinese. We achieve this through a 50/50 immersive model so the children spend half their day being taught in English in an English environment and the other half of the day in a Chinese classroom being taught in Chinese.

A typical day at Kensington Wade would see maths followed by comprehension, writing, music, science, PE and reading – just the same as in any other prep school – the only difference is that at Kensington Wade for half the day those lessons are taught in Chinese.

We offer a completely immersive approach whereby English and Chinese are used for both the curriculum content and as the medium of instruction. Teachers use one language or the other, but never both, in class.

Our Chinese teachers are native speakers and pupils also benefit from being in the same environment as classmates who have Chinese as their first language.

This immersive approach at Kensington Wade means our pupils develop high levels of proficiency in both languages and achieve the same or higher academic performance as at other schools.

At Kensington Wade we foster close relationships with our families and we are most definitely a school for all children. It does not matter if a child’s family does not speak Chinese, we are well equipped for this and provide support for help at home.