Yateley Manor

Your Child, Their Journey, Our Focus

Yateley Manor is regarded as a pioneering school in terms of its recent approach to curriculum design.  With its focus on rigorous academic standards coupled with a broad and balanced curriculum, the school delivers an education for the twenty-first century.

The School’s six core values: Happiness, Reflectiveness, Community, Resilience, Teamwork and Relationships run like a vein through the community.  They help guide behaviour and actions so that they are in alignment with the school’s beliefs and brings the community together.

The School’s emphasis on educating the whole child is supported by a wide-ranging enrichment programme.  Activities include chess, dance, horse riding, drama, water sports and modern pentathlon and the school is always keen to find new opportunities for children to fulfil their potential.

Innovative and committed staff are the school’s most valuable resource and there is a strong culture of continuing professional development with staff regularly attending external courses, as well as weekly after school workshops and sharing best practice. 

Staff embrace the different learning styles of children and incorporate varied approaches into lessons.  The result is that children may spend a day being Vikings, visiting a Celtic farm, creating maths games to bolster understanding of probability or fractions or cooking during science to reinforce the difference between physical and chemical changes.  

A building housing a state of the art Music School, spacious and light rooms for Art and DT and a new Modern Foreign Languages Department provide children with opportunities in performing and creative arts.  The School’s superb teaching facilities are complemented by excellent sports amenities including a heated indoor swimming pool, a large sports hall with indoor cricket nets and provision for football, netball and basketball, a gymnasium, a climbing wall, Aeroball and several pitches. 

The Woodland Learning Area is an inspirational educational environment which gives younger children the freedom to explore nature in a hands-on and child-led approach.  This helps build confidence, independence and self-esteem as well as giving children new life skills.

If you would like to discover more about all that Yateley Manor has to offer please email registrar@yateleymanor.com or telephone 01252 405500.

Chess at Yateley Manor

Yateley Manor is known for its high standard of chess and the School has a reputation for producing excellent players.  Yateley Manor was one of the first prep schools in Britain to recognise the value of chess as part of the curriculum and to employ a Director of Chess, International Master Andrew Martin, who has been instrumental in making the game part of the fabric of school life for the last thirty years. 

The game is an integral part of the School’s broad educational experience.  It is an ideal educational tool having been shown to develop the brain and enhance thinking skills.  Chess is taught both for enjoyment and for its transferable skills: concentration, learning how to make decisions, accepting responsibility and sharpening thought processes all of which are highly beneficial to other aspects of school life. It is also fun to play and always a challenge! 

At Yateley Manor children in the Pre-Prep can learn chess from the age of 5 and children from Year 1 are welcome to join chess club. Some of our younger players take part in inter-school matches, often very successfully, against children who are much older.  Older Yateley Manor children have plenty of opportunities to play, with open clubs, matches and masterclasses.  The school regularly boasts several county players.

The school fields several teams including an all-girls team.  We enter School teams into the English Chess Federation’s Girls Competition, Independent Association of Prep School’s National Competition, the U19 National Schools Chess Championships and EPSCA at both U11 and U9 levels.  A large number of children also take part in the UK Chess Challenge each year.

“My children have absolutely loved playing chess at Yateley Manor. My son started at infants' school and my daughter had only completed a few lessons before joining Yateley Manor. 

Both have made amazing progress and really enjoyed chess club as a way of gaining confidence and playing against other children in school. It’s a really friendly club with children supporting and helping each other. From early on the older children have given them tips on how to improve and they now do the same for those learning. 

The club helped them make steady progress and improve their skill set. 

Due to the excellent tutoring, patience and encouragement of Mr Martin both, over a period of time, and at differing paces, were promoted to Chess Masterclass B and then A.  They have now both been selected to play for Hampshire Chess team. 

It’s been fantastic to see them grow in confidence and passion for the game. They love entering the competitions both in and out of school, playing each other at home and challenging members of our family. They have made friends at competitions and even played on line in competitions in lockdown. 

It is a fantastic game for teaching them to plan, think in terms of many moves ahead, consequences and game plans. 

I’d thoroughly recommend parents encourage their children to join and start playing.”  Parent