Welcome to Headway International.
At Headway International, we believe every child is unique and full of potential. Our international pre-school provides a safe, nurturing, and stimulating environment where young learners take their first steps toward a lifelong journey of discovery. We combine global teaching methods with a child-centered approach, encouraging curiosity, creativity, and confidence. Through play-based learning, cultural diversity, and caring guidance, we help children grow socially, emotionally, and academically.
Small enough to know every name. Serious enough to see it through.
At Headway International Pre-School, we provide a wide range of programs designed to support every stage of your child’s early development. Our services go beyond academics, focusing on the social, emotional, physical, and creative growth of each child.
Through play-based learning, cultural diversity and caring guidance, we help children grow into curious, confident little people — ready, when the time comes, to walk into big school as though it already belonged to them.
Four years, one continuous line.
Nothing here is a fresh start. Each stage is built on the one below it, by teachers who can walk down the corridor and ask the person who taught them the year before.
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Toddler
The first bridge away from home. Here, growth is measured in small confidences: letting go of a parent’s hand at the door, learning to point to a feeling, and discovering that the world outside family is safe.
Toddler -
Playgroup
Curiosity finds company. Children learn to share a space, wait for a turn without tears, and use their voices to make friends — days noisy with early language, spilled paint, and the discovery of how things fit together.
Playgroup -
Lower Kindergarten
Structure begins to take shape, but wonder stays at the centre. Sitting on a rug turns into listening to full stories, holding a pencil feels natural, and questions become sentences. The focus shifts from me to us.
Lower Kindergarten -
Upper Kindergarten
The final year of early childhood, where everything comes together. Children leave reading early sentences, settling their own disagreements, and walking with the quiet pride of someone who knows how school works.
Upper Kindergarten
Choose a stage.
The first bridge away from home — gentle separation, small confidences, and a world outside family that is safe and kind.
Explore
Curiosity finds company: sharing a space, waiting for a turn, and making friends amid early language and spilled paint.
Explore
Structure begins to take shape while wonder stays at the centre — full stories, first pencils, and questions that become sentences.
Explore
The last year of early childhood, where it all comes together — early reading, real independence, and readiness for big school.
Explore
A warm, supervised home from home for working families — meals, rest and play, before school and long after the last bell.
Explore
Guided, not driven.
Play is serious work at this age. Our approach comes down to four things, and we are happy to be held to all of them.
- A prepared environment. The room is set up so a child can reach, choose, use and return everything without an adult. Independence is a matter of shelf height before it is a matter of character.
- Learning through play. Play is how young children make sense of the world, so we protect long, unhurried stretches of it rather than break a child out for the sake of a timetable.
- Observation before instruction. A teacher’s first job is to watch. Most of what a child needs, they will show you, if you leave a gap long enough for them to.
- Concrete, then abstract. A child pours the water and stacks the blocks before they meet the letter or the number. Hands first; the symbols follow when they are ready.
Rooms that do their share of the teaching.
A house on Kandy Road with a garden behind it, cared for over thirteen years — added to gently, never faster than we could staff it properly.
“People ask what makes a Headway child different when they leave for big school at six. It is not the reading age. It is that they walk in already sure that school is a place that belongs to them.”
Mrs. Shiromi PereraPrincipal, Headway International School
Come and see a Tuesday morning.
We do not do open days. We would rather you came on an ordinary morning, while the school is working, and made up your own mind.