A pre-school we would send our own children to.
That was the whole brief in 2013, and it still is. Everything since — the extra rooms, the kindergarten years, the day care — grew out of families who did not want to leave, and we could not give them a good reason why they should.
Headway opened in January 2013 in a converted house on Kandy Road with a Toddler room, a Playgroup room, a garden, and two teachers who believed a small child learns best by playing seriously and being genuinely known.
We meant to be exactly that — a warm, unhurried pre-school for the very young. What we had not accounted for was what happens the year a child turns four. Parents came to ask what was next, and rather than hand a settled, curious child on to a place that would spend a year teaching them to sit still, we opened a Lower Kindergarten, and then an Upper.
In 2018 we added Day Care, because the families we served worked, and a good morning is little use if the afternoon is a worry. We have grown one room at a time ever since — never faster than we could staff it properly.
What stayed the same
An Upper Kindergarten room looks busier than a Toddler one, and there is a good deal more reading in it. But the underlying bargain has not changed since 2013: we prepare the environment, the child does the work, and the adult’s first instinct is to watch rather than to interrupt.
That is why we have stayed small on purpose. A school that knows every child by name is a specific size, and we are already at it.
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2013 — The first mornings
A Toddler and Playgroup pre-school opens on Kandy Road.
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2015 — Kindergarten
Lower and Upper Kindergarten added; the first UKG leavers.
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2018 — Day Care
Full-day care opens for working families, in the same rooms.
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2023 — Ten years
The Pearson · Edexcel Early Years framework is adopted throughout.
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2026 — Thirteen years
A settled pre-school of four stages and a day care, still in one house.
Hold us to these four.
Plenty of places promise a happy pre-school. Here is precisely what we mean by ours, in four commitments, so that you can check.
A prepared environment
Every shelf is at child height. Every material has one place and the child returns it there. Nothing is locked. Independence starts as a question of furniture and only later becomes a question of character.
Learning through play
Play is how a young child makes sense of the world, so we protect long, unhurried stretches of it. Concentration takes a while to arrive and a second to lose — and it is the last thing we will trade for a tidier timetable.
Observation before instruction
Our teachers keep written observation notes on every child, every week. They are the basis of what we offer a child next — not a scheme of work decided in advance by someone who has never met them.
Concrete, then abstract
A child pours the water and stacks the blocks before they ever meet a letter or a number. By Upper Kindergarten the symbols have arrived, but the habit of asking what is this really was built with the hands, first.
Mrs. Sharminie Rajaratnam
“I was one of the two teachers in 2013, and I have watched this little pre-school become something none of us drew on paper. What I am proudest of is unglamorous: our teachers stay. Several of them have been here since the first mornings.
That is the whole trick, if there is one. A child in Upper Kindergarten can be discussed by the person teaching them now and the person who first settled them at two and a half, in the same corridor, on the same afternoon. No file, no handover, no starting again.
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.”
Come on an ordinary morning.
No presentation, no prospectus reading. Walk the corridor while the school is working and watch what the children do when nobody is telling them to.