We have 4 houses:

Peake

Dekker

Attenborough

Akita

But we haven't always had these house names...

Back in September 2013, House teams were first introduced to John Blandy. As our school was originally built to teach boys Navigation skills, we researched and chose 4 famous explorers to name our House teams after! Our houses were named after:

Sir Francis Drake- Explorer of the World

Sir Edmund Hillary- Explorer of Mountains

Sylvia Earle- Explorer of Oceans

Neil Armstrong- Explorer of Space

However, in July 2022, staff and children raised that they would like to change the names of the houses because one of our houses was named after Sir Francis Drake. He had featured on the news as someone who had been involved in the English Slave Trade, something that we did not want to associate our Houses with. 

We wanted to keep with the idea of navigation and the Year 6 children were tasked to research and present to the rest of the school modern-day Discoverers of the world, the sea, the mountains and space. They presented their person to the rest of the school who then voted in their new House name. The winners were:

Peake 

Named after Tim Peake

First British Astronaut to spend 6 months on the International Space Station.

Dekker 

Named after Laura Dekker

Youngest person to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly. 

Attenborough

Named after Sir David Attenborough

A naturalist who has learnt and shared about nature and how we need to look after our world around us.

Akita 

Named after Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita

First Nepali woman to reach the summit of K2 and has worked actively to provide relief in the aftermath of the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal. She explains, “I am not educating girls so they can be mountaineers. Once a woman has an education, she can be whatever she wants. I want to support what women want to become."

Children from all classes are grouped into the four houses, and work together as a team to collect house points. Children can earn house points for displaying the school values in all that they do.

Each week, the House Captains total up all the house points and the House Cup it awarded to the winning House in our Friday Celebration Assembly!