OUR values, HISTory, facilities and school organisation 

Safeguarding  Statement

At Tower Hamlets  primary schools, there is nothing more important to us than the physical and emotional health and well-being of our pupils. As such, we have created and worked relentlessly to maintain a climate in which staff, pupils, parents and governors feel able to voice concerns comfortably; knowing that effective action will be taken. We are fully committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all our pupils. We engender the principle that safeguarding is 'everyone's responsibility'. All staff and volunteers should raise any concerns they have about poor or unsafe practice and potential failures in the school safeguarding regime.

Our School Values

Our Facilities

Globe Primary School was built in 1874 and has a long established tradition of providing education for the Bethnal Green community.

Our school is a community primary school in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and serves a varied and diverse community from many cultural backgrounds. Boys and girls attend our school from the age of three, when they start Nursery, to the age of eleven after which they transfer to a secondary school.

Our school has an additionally resourced provision for children with special educational needs. There are thirty places for children who need additional support in their speech, language and communication development; children who have an Education and Health Care Plan (EHCP) with a diagnosis of Development Language Delay (DLD). These places are allocated by the Local Authority. More details of what we call our ‘Language Provision’ are found here Our Specialist Speech and Language Provision.

School Information Pack - New Admissions

In September 2025, a local nursery school, Rachel Keeling Nursery,  amalgamated with Globe, adding a second site to our school.  A building furbished for and dedicated solely to the education of nursery children, fortunately became part of our school. We became a school with two sites and our school is now organised in the following way.

Nursery Site - We call it the Rachel Keeling Nursery Site, in memory and recognition of the school that closed; a school that provided many years of quality nursery provision to the Bethnal Green community.  It is 5 minutes walk away the main school site and is located at Bullards Place, Morpeth Street, E2 0PS. It has an exceptional garden area for children to learn in and enjoy. Only Nursery aged children are taught on this site - a mix of 15 hour morning and afternoon places and 30 hour (full time) places, as well as some morning 2 year old places.  There are 120 full time equivalent places in total. 

Based on this nursery site we have another special needs provision, dedicated to support nursery aged children with a range of special educational needs.  This is called the Early Years Intervention Provision and more information can be found about it on the following page of our website: Our Early Years Intervention Provision.

Main School Site - This is the old Globe school building on Gawber Street, E2 0JH and from September 2025, no nursery children are taught on this site, only Reception to Year 6. 

On the main site on Gawber Street, our environment consists of a large three story refurbished Victorian building within a walled playground. We have a continuing programme of improvement to keep the premises attractive, safe, comfortable and stimulating for everyone.

We have the added unique feature of a roof playground which is used by the children every day. We have all sorts up there, bikes, scooters, climbing frames and even a garden!

We also have an extremely well equipped Computer Room which houses 33 touch screen computers in which classes are taught weekly computing lessons. In addition to this we have class sets of iPads.

Our library is something that we are very proud of.  It is cosy and extremely well-resourced and it just makes you want to read!  All year groups visit, use and borrow from the library. 

You will find our Music Room right at the top of our school and this is used every day for class music lessons or instrument tuition. Pop in there and you’ll find steel pans, violins, trumpets, trombone, flutes and clarinets being played. 

We are lucky to have a Community House called Hartley House (named after our previous School Premises Manager who lived in that house for 34 years) on the other side of our playground. This is a great resource for us as this is where we have our Sensory Room, can cook, as well as run workshops for parents. 

Hall space, we have a lot of hall space! We are very fortunate to have three large halls where many activities take place, for instance, assemblies, performances, physical education lessons and breakfast clubs. The middle hall is used as our dining room over the lunchtime period.

These extensive facilities allow us to be flexible and creative in our teaching methods and approaches as appropriate to the needs of individuals, small groups and whole classes. 

A Little Bit of Globe History

Globe School first opened its doors to children in October 1874. It was built to take 1,105 children. About 20 years later they built an extension. This now accommodates the school kitchen and class rooms above and below. This was so that the school could take another 400 children. Making a grand total of 1,505 children.

When the building first opened it was three separate schools. The ground floor being an infant school, first floor was a girls’ school and the top floor a boys’ school. Each with their own Headteacher. This is very different today where we have usually have around 367 children on roll.

In the early days the classrooms had terracing in them so that they could fit as many children as possible into each room. They would have probably only had a slate and pencil. Nothing like the equipment and facilities that we have today.

During World War 2, the majority of children in London were evacuated to the countryside. Globe was then used as a refuge centre for families who had been bombed out of their homes. The school suffered slight damage from bomb blasts but nothing serious.

In 2024, we celebrated the 150 year anniversary of Globe providing an education to the Bethnal Green Community. 

In September 2025 Globe amalgamated with Rachel Keeling Nursery School, adding a new dimension to Globe's history and a second site to our school.  Here is some information about the history of Rachel Keeling Nursery School. 

Who was Rachel Keeling?
Rachel Keeling School was named in the honour of one of the suffragettes; Rachel Susanna Keeling. Rachel Susanna Keeling (née Townsend) (1885 - 26 September 1969) was a suffragette and Labour Party politician.
She was the daughter of the Reverend Chambre Corker Townshend, an architect, and his wife Emily Caroline née Gibson. Emily Townshend was an early feminist and Fabian socialist.
Rachel became a member of the women's suffrage movement, which led to her imprisonment in 1908.  She moved to London and was subsequently elected to the London County Council as a Labour Party councillor for Bethnal Green North East in 1934. She was re-elected in 1937 and resigned in 1941.
Rachel died in September 1969 aged 84. 

 

Within England there has been a history of nursery education since the 1920s.  Indeed there was an emphasis of providing high quality nursery education particularly in areas of deprivation, as a means of raising standards for all children, including those who may be potentially disadvantaged.
As part of this process Rachel Keeling Nursery school was opened in 1962 by  Mrs. B H Tate and the then mayor of Bethnal Green Mrs  Bentwich; as shown in pictures provided by London Metropolitan Archives Culture, Heritage and Libraries Department.

The Globe and Bangabandhu Soft Federation

We are in a soft federation with another local Bethnal Green school, Bangabandhu Primary School. Please click the link below to visit the Soft Federation page which will give you more details about what this means.

Click here to view The Globe and Bangabandhu Soft Federation page.

Organisation of Classes

We are a ‘one and a half form entry’ school which means that from Reception onwards, each year group has 45 children. 

However, that does not mean there are 45 in a class! Class sizes from Y1 onwards are 30 with Reception being 22 or 23. Our classes are arranged as follows:

Nursery - based on the Rachel Keeling Site, Bullards Place, Morpeth Street, E 2 0PS

3 classes - Sunflower, Bluebell and Rose

2 year olds - 15 hour places only

3 & 4 year olds - 15 hour & 30 hour places

Reception to Year 6 - based on the main school site, Gawber Stree, E2 0JH

Two Reception classes, one class of 22 and one of 23.

Key Stage 1

Year One, Year One/Two, Year Two, a Specialist Class

Lower Key Stage 2

Year Three, Year Three/Four, Year Four

Upper Key Stage 2

Year Five, Year Five/Six, Year Six

Language Provision

(This is what we call our additionally resourced provision for children with speech, language and communication need, children who have a diagnosis of developmental language disorder.).

Our Language Provision class is called after Dorothy Bishop, a British psychologist who  specialises in developmental disorders specifically, developmental language impairments. There are two bases to this class, Group 1 and Group 2 (Early Years and Key Stage 1)

The older Key Stage 2  children within our additionally resourced provision (language provision) then transfer to the larger Key Stage 2 mainstream classes.  

All our other classes are named after individuals who have made a stand or fought for equality.  

More information can be found here Our Specialist Speech and Language Provision.

Classes 2025-2026

On the main school site, Reception to Year 6, classes are named after people who have spoken up and campaigned for equality, justice and the recognition of individual rights.  And on a completely different note, our nursery classes are called after flowers!

Year Group	Class Name	Class Teacher
Nursery	Sunflower Class	Sima Sultana
Nursery	Rose Class	Lize Visagie
Nursery	Bluebell Class	Maria Ioannou
Reception 1	Mary Seacole Class	Jenny Johnson/Melissa Allen
Reception 2	Florence Nightingale Class	May Nessa
Y1	David Attenborough Class	Nick Smith
Y1/2	Nelson Mandela Class	Shahana Akanjee
Y2	Emmeline Pankhurst Class	Greg O Donnell/Lydia Girdham
Language Provision	Dorothy Bishop Class	Rehana Jamil
Specialist Class	River Class	Ella Heredge Thomas
Y3	Princess Diana Class	Senem Arslan
Y3/4	Begum Rokeya Class	Ellen Ellis
Y4	Amal Clooney Class	Shahanara Khatun
Y5	Malala Yousafzai Class	Ikram Mohamed
Y5/6	Harriet Tubman Class	Oliver Grimwood
Y6	Thunder Hawk Class	Lynda Van Zyl