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Our View
This brand-new co-ed in London’s Olympia looks like a modernist art gallery with its resplendent nine storeys packed with state-of-the-art facilities. Part of the Inspired Group, it opened its exquisitely designed doors in September 2025, filling from the bottom up – currently 100 Year 7 to 9 pupils are enjoying the avant-garde space, hi-tech academic excellence and bumper co-curricular programme, as well as endless opportunities to take part in camps and exchanges with more than 100 Inspired schools around the world. By 2030, the school will have pupils in every year group, so parents will be able to have their children educated in a Wetherby school from ages two to 18.
Where?
Attached to one end of the almost-completed new Olympia exhibition and convention centre, Wetherby Pembridge is a real head-turner inside and out. Every floor has a complete wall of windows giving breathtaking views across London, while an inner atrium rising from the ground floor library to the top-floor gym brings light to the back of the building that is adjacent to the centre. There will be no direct access to the exhibition centre, but the school will be able to use some of its facilities, including the enormous theatre, although it does have its own 200-seat facility. The white-washed classrooms have a central interactive screen with a whiteboard on either side, and each floor has a breakout area with sofas where pupils can take time out.
Kensington Olympia Station is seconds away, and nearby local tube stations provide direct services to Kensington, Hammersmith, Clapham Junction and beyond. Almost all pupils live within half an hour and either walk, take public transport or use the school-bus service – there is a no car drop-off policy.
Head
Having opened Harrow New York, a role he took on after 17 years at Harrow UK, head Nick Page is the go-to man for a new metropolitan school. Indeed, Inspired approached him at a time when he had no intention of leaving his job in Long Island. But the offer of the Wetherby Pembridge headship was too exciting to resist, and Mr Page clearly has no regrets. An experienced and impassioned educator, he is teaching pupils French and Spanish in this first year alongside his duties as head, as well as fostering the school values of respect, resilience, ambition and kindness, with particular emphasis on the latter. ‘Kindness is the chief among equals,’ he says. And with the financial heft of the Inspired Group securing the school’s resources, he is free to focus on building a top-drawer institution full of pupils ‘who are interested in turning up and who will throw themselves into everything both in and outside their comfort zone’.
Admissions
An extraordinary 800 families attended the school’s first open day, so expect places to be hotly contested. It is academically selective, with two entry routes designed to welcome both pupils from Inspired prep schools and those joining from elsewhere. Inspired pupils sit English and maths papers and attend an interview in the first term of Year 6, with places offered in December; the remaining places are offered through an online assessment in verbal and non-verbal reasoning, English, maths and puzzle solving. Those who pass are invited for an interview and written assessments in English and maths, and offers are made in February. About a third of the current cohort are from Inspired schools; the rest come from 30 other schools. Approximately 20 per cent of pupils receive financial aid, some with 100 per cent of fees covered.
Academics and senior school destinations
Brilliant teaching coupled with cutting-edge technology puts the school in a strong position when it comes to academics. Years 7 and 8 are soaking up languages, including French, Spanish, German and Latin (many already speak two languages at home), and the number of languages on offer is set to grow as the school does. The STEAM offering is also stellar, with five large science labs and a huge prep lab, plus the latest in educational technology. Pupils use devices alongside exercise books in a neat balance of tradition and technology (the school leases devices out to pupils, preloaded with what they need). Homework (90 minutes a night) is assigned electronically, and class notes are uploaded so pupils have everything they need to study and revise.
Every Tuesday morning starts with a test in a carousel of subjects ‘to get pupils used to taking formal exams’, says Mr Page. The first set of GCSE exams will take place in 2028, with nine subjects including English, maths, three sciences, a modern language and three options. Mr Page tells us the school’s Super-Curriculum is honed for scholarly endeavour, giving room for lectures and academic competitions, including Olympiads. A-level exams will then be taken from 2030. ‘A-levels give a depth of study and are gold standard,’ says Mr Page. ‘But it is what you put around it that builds out the wider scholarship.’ It will be exciting to see the paths pupils take after A-levels.
Co-curricular
‘Sport is for everyone,’ says Mr Page, and the swanky top-floor gym with all the equipment you could ask for, as well as a dojo room for martial arts and a fencing area, is a real draw. The school also has 15 acres of playing fields in Wood Lane, and Fulham Reach Boat Club is used for swimming and rowing. Up to Year 9, pupils have a minimum of four hours of sport a week, and every year group will have an afternoon of sport up to Year 13. The current pupils have already got stuck into fixtures. Girls play hockey in the autumn, netball in the spring and co-ed cricket and athletics in the summer, while boys do football and rugby in the first two terms.
Performing arts takes over the whole of the sixth floor, with a performance space for drama lessons that doubles as a dance studio, a swish music-tech room with integrated keyboards in the tables and music practice rooms – the school will find a teacher for any instrument that a pupil would like to learn. There’s already a choir, rock band and piano trio. The theatre sits across the ground and lower-ground floors. Seating 200, it’s an extraordinary space with a flat stage, racked seating and state-of-the-art lighting and sound, as well as its own entrance from the street. For their first term, pupils staged a promenade performance of
A Christmas Carol and are now rehearsing
Alice in Wonderland. Art is on the third floor in a space that includes a dark room and kiln; this floor will also house study rooms and a study lounge for sixth-formers.
Sitting at the heart of the school, the glass-ceilinged library is a hive of activity, not a temple of silence. Every year group has weekly library lessons (reading is built into homework), and is staffed by a full-time and pupil librarians.
Staff run clubs that include everything from sports and performing arts to academics. Pupils sign up to three a week (they are held from 4pm to 5pm), and there are also daily lunchtime clubs that regularly change. Mr Page feels it’s important for pupils to interact with staff in these clubs as well as in the classroom as, he says, ‘very successful teaching is based on great relationships’.
School community
There are four houses, and they are integral to the school culture and pupil wellbeing – a system that Mr Page has seen serving boarding schools well. Pupils stay in their house throughout their time at Wetherby Pembridge, with housemasters and mistresses overseeing them and helping to create a supportive triangle connecting pupils, parents and school. Tutor groups are vertical and meet daily at the start of the school day, while house meetings take place weekly. PSHE lessons are timetabled to Year 13 and there’s a school counsellor.
There is a pupil recreation room with soft furnishings, a piano, table tennis and air hockey. It opens into the foyer of the theatre, where a parents’ café will soon open. Pupils eat in the slick dining room on the fifth floor where canteen-style hot and cold food is cooked on site. There’s a terrace where pupils can eat outside, and the school is going to install Astroturf in the area, as well as table tennis tables and foosball. Accompanied by a teacher, pupils also walk to nearby Brook Green three times a week to play football.
Many families live locally and are expats or international. The school’s opening continues to generate huge interest; the day after our visit, 200 prospective pupils attended the second round of the admissions process. The Friends of Wetherby Pembridge are already building a parents’ community and are lining up to serve as ambassadors for the school. ‘Parents are on side,’ says Mr Page.
And finally....
This super-school in west London is one of the capital’s most exciting new educational offerings. From its jaw-dropping building to its top-tier staff who have been recruited from the cream of schools in the UK and beyond, Wetherby Pembridge feels like the future. No wonder parents are keen – with a capacity for 500 pupils by 2030, this senior school for Wetherby preps and Pembridge Hall to feed into is a hugely compelling all-through option.