About

Welcome to our website and thank you for taking an interest in Cantell School. It is a great honour and an absolute privilege to be the Headteacher of this wonderful school and I have been so for the last 7 years. We are proud to be a heavily oversubscribed, inclusive comprehensive school with a student intake that reflects a wonderfully diverse and vibrant local community. We are proud founding members of the Aspire Community Trust. Our family of schools are based in the wonderfully vibrant and diverse City of Southampton, on the South Coast of England. Our trust is based on the co-operative values of: self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. We believe in openness, honesty, social responsibility and caring for others. Our fundamental mission is to provide an exceptional learning experience for every student so that they may lead a happy and successful life now and in the future. We achieve this by setting the very highest of expectations, cultivating a no excuses culture, developing a highly ambitious curriculum, providing inspirational teaching, offering life changing opportunities through an incredible range of co-curricular activities, trips, visits and other opportunities for our young people to develop their life skills.

At Cantell, our values, the Cantell Cs shape the way our community work together. We expect from students and staff: Challenge, Creativity, Commitment, Cooperation and Courtesy.

Our staff work very hard to ensure that learning takes place in a culture of mutual respect and understanding. They go above and beyond every day to ensure the provision our students receive is the very best and this has been no different through the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything, the pandemic has brought us all closer together and there is a palpable sense of ‘family’ emanating from the school.

We expect nothing less than exemplary student behaviour and attitudes to learning whilst accepting that young people can make mistakes, and this is how they learn and develop both academically and socially. We believe that all students can succeed and exceed expectations by developing their Cantell Empower Skills of: Leadership, Organisation, Resilience, Initiative, Communication, Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Cantell has been on a journey of significant improvement of the last few years and we are proud to be known as a happy and successful school; the school of choice for families in the local area. The GCSE results our students achieve year on year have been very strong and has ultimately led to rates of progress which are consistently above the national averages. Our success is very much down to the hard work of our students, who are supported by a passionate, dedicated and highly skilled staff team.

At Cantell, we are very clear that students only get one chance at their education. We know and understand that it is our moral imperative to turn that chance into a pathway to success, and our broad and balanced curriculum supports us to achieve this aim. This is complemented by our wide range of extracurricular clubs, and array of trips and visits, which ensure our students make memories and friendships for a lifetime.I hope this gives you a flavour of what Cantell is all about. You can find out much more from our website, but, above all, I welcome you to come and see us in action. Please do contact us at headspa@cantell.co.uk or call us on 02380 516722 to arrange a visit.

Warmest regards,

Harry Kutty
Headteacher of Cantell School
Trust Leader of the Aspire Community Trust