The question behind the Newton plaque
Somewhere in Grantham's King's School, Isaac Newton's signature is carved into a window sill — a mark left when he was a pupil there in the 1650s. Across town at Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, a chemistry notebook from a lower-sixth student in the early 1940s still survives in legible handwriting. Two artefacts. Two selective schools in a Lincolnshire market town. And, between them, a question that TED talks on education have circled for years — one that TEDx Grantham is well placed to examine: does an institution's culture change what a student believes they are capable of becoming?
The debate about selective schools usually begins with access, and rightly so. But the question this article holds is narrower and distinct: not who gets through the door, but what these schools actually do to STEM ambition once students are inside. Access and culture are related, yet collapsing them misses something important about how institutions shape scientific identity — and why two grammar schools in one market town have sustained measurable science cultures across more than a century.
How King's School turned a historical alumnus into a living curriculum
The Newton Block, opened in 2008, houses the school's mathematics teaching. That single fact — a purpose-built facility named for a seventeenth-century alumnus and dedicated to the subject he transformed — captures something deliberate about how King's School manages its most famous association.
The Physics Department makes the intention explicit in its own published language. Newton's achievement, it states, "still drives the department to achieve the highest accolades and results." This is not heritage brochure copy; it is a departmental statement of professional ambition, positioning a figure from the 1650s as the living standard against which current work is measured.
The mechanisms go further than language. The Newtonian Awards, administered by the Old Trust Committee, provide financial prizes to King's students who go on to read mathematics or physics at leading universities — a tangible incentive that ties school identity directly to university trajectory. The Annual Newton Lecture brings practising scientists into the school calendar, connecting the historical name to contemporary research rather than leaving it stranded in the past. Students enter the UKMT Mathematics Challenge, the British Physics Olympiad, and the British Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad — external competitions providing independent benchmarking alongside the internal culture.
What emerges is a layered apparatus: architecture, institutional language, financial incentives, a lecture series, and structured competition entries, all organised around a single name. King's School ranks in the top ten per cent of English schools — 62.6 per cent of GCSE grades at 9–7, nearly three-quarters of A-level grades at A*–B. That attainment record is consistent with such a culture, though as the school across town illustrates, the Newton branding is only one way to build sustained STEM ambition across more than a century.
KGGS: science culture that predates its most famous alumna
Chemistry was part of KGGS from the day it opened. On 20 September 1910, 102 students arrived at a school that already had a dedicated Chemistry laboratory on the first floor — not a converted classroom, but a purpose-built facility. Science was structural from the start, not grafted on after the school had established itself in other subjects.
The conceptual frame for that structure came from the school's founder, Miss H Gladys Williams. In a 1924 speech she set out what education at KGGS was actually for: not passing examinations or accumulating credentials, but developing 'the complete human being herself', producing girls 'capable and desirous of doing some part of the world's work well.' Formation, not certification — a distinction that places the school's science culture within a broader educational philosophy rather than a narrowly instrumental one.
The most legible evidence of that culture in action is Margaret Thatcher, who attended on a scholarship from a Grantham grocer's family. By the age of 16 chemistry was her strongest subject, taught by Miss Kay; her lower-sixth notebooks from 1942 survive in readable handwriting, detailing qualitative chemistry. She served as Head Girl in 1942/43 and won a place to read Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. The chronology, however, matters: the Chemistry laboratory predated Thatcher's enrolment by roughly three decades. She is a product of the school's science culture — not its cause.
That culture has proved durable. In 2025, Biology and Chemistry each recorded 100 per cent pass rates at GCSE across 148 and 149 entries respectively, with the same outcome at A-level in both subjects.
What TED talks on STEM identity get right about school culture
The argument TED talks on education return to most persistently is not about individual talent — it is about whether institutions create the conditions for students to see themselves as capable. Entry to a school, these talks tend to argue, is a precondition; what the school then does with that entry is the actual variable.
Research on STEM self-concept gives this claim precise shape. Students in STEM-focused programmes consistently show stronger STEM identities — in interest, in perceived performance, and in being recognised as science people — than peers on other tracks. That recognition varies by school even within identically labelled STEM programmes. Institutional environment independently shapes whether students develop a science identity, beyond what ability or selection explains. Two schools selecting the same academic cohort can produce different STEM outcomes through culture alone.
That is exactly what the King's School and KGGS models demonstrate. At King's, the recognition structure is explicit: awards bearing Newton's name, a financial prize for students pursuing mathematics or physics at university, a lecture series connecting historical achievement to current research. At KGGS, the structure is less branded but longer-established — a laboratory from the day the school opened, a founding philosophy centred on formation over certification. Educational leadership, as TED talks on the subject tend to frame it, involves designing environments where aspiration becomes plausible for the students already inside them.
Who the culture reaches — and who it doesn't
Genuine culture and open access are not the same thing, and the distinction matters for anyone thinking about education in South Kesteven.
The Education Policy Institute's research on selective schools puts concrete numbers on the gap. Grammar school pupils gain roughly one-third of a GCSE grade per subject over comparable comprehensive peers — a real, measurable benefit. For free-school-meals-eligible pupils who do attend a grammar, that gain rises to approximately half a grade. But only 5.2 per cent of the national GCSE cohort attends grammar schools at all. Nationally, FSM-eligible pupils account for around 3 per cent of grammar school rolls, despite representing a considerably higher proportion of local populations.
The regional arithmetic is no more encouraging. In areas with higher concentrations of selective schools, the individual benefit for grammar attendees diminishes — dropping to roughly 0.1 of a grade per subject in fully selective areas. Meanwhile, progress at non-selective schools in those same areas tends to fall below the national average. The net effect on regional attainment is, the EPI concludes, neither positive nor negative.
For King's School and KGGS, this is the uncomfortable counterpart to everything sections two and three describe. The Newton-inflected identity scaffolding, the centenary chemistry laboratory, the 100 per cent pass rates — these are real achievements of institutional culture. But they are experienced by students who have already passed an eleven-plus threshold. The science ambition that those environments cultivate does not automatically radiate outward to the majority of children in Grantham and the surrounding villages who attend non-selective schools.
The culture question and the access question are separate — but neither can simply be set aside. For educational leaders in South Kesteven, the practical challenge is whether the conditions that make STEM identity plausible inside these schools can be extended, in any meaningful form, beyond their gates.
What Grantham's schools suggest about building STEM culture
Both models share one structural feature that has nothing to do with selective entry: they made STEM visible as an identity before students had to choose it as a qualification. King's School does this through named awards, dedicated physical space, and a lecture series that places contemporary research in Newton's lineage. KGGS did it by embedding a chemistry laboratory on day one and articulating, in 1924, a philosophy of formation rather than certification. The mechanism in each case is institutional deliberateness — decisions made years or decades before any individual student arrived.
Neither school sustained this through the energy of a single leader. Both are products of long, slow accumulation: a block built in 2008, a laboratory from 1910, a speech made between the wars. TED talks on educational leadership tend to ask what environment design can do that selection alone cannot. That question has a practical edge in this context.
A non-selective school in South Kesteven cannot replicate an eleven-plus threshold, but it can name its science spaces, run recognition rituals, and frame its purpose in terms that make scientific aspiration legible to students who have never thought of themselves as science people. Whether those acts compound into cultures of the kind described here is genuinely uncertain — but they are acts that any institution can choose. That, rather than the selective entry that surrounds them, is where the educational leadership question actually sits.
- [1] The King's School, Grantham. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=7081013 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=7081013
- [2] Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=7090513 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=7090513
- [3] Thai students' STEM identities after compulsory education by gender, educational programme, and career aspiration. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2024.2371651 https://doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2024.2371651