River Academy has an excellent extra-curricular offer designed to stimulate the student’s academic curiosity, to develop them as individuals, to offer sporting, artistic and dramatic opportunities and to allow everyone to try something new.

Every Wednesday we offer our Electives programme. All students stay until 4.30pm for this programme to take part in an activity.

These have included:

• Badminton
• Board Games
• Chess
• Crafting
• Creative writing
• Cricket
• Debate Club
• EcoClub
• First Aid
• Fitness
• Knitting
• Korean
• Mock Trial
• Photography
• Readipop Recording Studio
• Rowing at Reading Rowing Club
• School Newspaper
• School Show
• Softball

These sessions are great fun and allow the students to mix in different groups, meet new teachers and try out something completely new.

In addition, we have a range of other clubs that are voluntary and take place throughout the week. These include drama, choir, sports clubs (athletics, football (boys and girls), rugby, netball and badminton) and homework club. Our girls’ netball team won the Reading Schools’ Cup this year which was a great achievement for our brand-new school!

We also run day trips as part of the school curriculum and extra-curricular trips as voluntary opportunities for anyone to participate in.

In our first year of opening all of our students participated in a trip to the pantomime at the Hexagon Theatre in Reading and multi-subject curriculum link day in Reading visiting Reading Abbey, Forbury Gardens, Reading Museum, The Oracle and the Hexagon. Furthermore, over 100 students went to PGL Liddington for a long weekend of daring and challenging activities such as high ropes, zip wire, abseiling, kayaking and many more. We are also participating in the Maiden Erlegh Trust ski trip in the Easter of 2025 with over 200 students from the four secondary schools partaking in an alpine adventure in Italy.

River Academy also has a healthy inter form competition calendar. From Sports Day to football, chess, spelling bee, science quizzes, basketball and handball, the students regularly compete against each other for their houses (Thames, Kennet, Pang, Loddon, Lambourne and Avon). These events are always fiercely competitive but are great fun and bring the whole school together with everyone expected to participate.

We have a strong provision for our most able students too. In the academic year 2024-2025 we offered seventeen different events and activities that were open to everyone within the school. All of our Higher Attaining Pupils took part in at least one activity and many in over ten, and over 50% of our students in total contributed to at least one activity from the programme.

These included:

• A Cambridge University talk on seal movements in the Antarctic
• A climate change lecture
• Introduction to Italian
• Local history workshops
• Maths Challenge puzzle workshop
• Roman board games workshop
• Royal Academy of Arts watercolour workshop
• Sports Science lecture on understanding elite performance
• ‘The Beak Buffet’- a biology and evolution class
• Villains in Literature lecture
• Young Poets workshop

Our students can also take weekly instrumental music lessons and singing lessons delivered by the Berkshire Music Trust. Lastly, it is our intention to offer LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) classes in the academic year 2025-2026 in order to offer external qualifications and structured opportunities for our students in this area of the curriculum.

Trips and Visits 

Every student at River Academy will have access to a wide variety of offsite trips during their time at the school to complement the classroom-based provision. Trips may be extra-curricular and offer the opportunity to build cultural capital or be a critical aspect of a subject’s curriculum. 

This year all of our students have been to the pantomime, visited a variety of sites in Reading to make links to their school curriculum and had the option of attending the PGL residential. Groups of students were selected to attend visits to both the University of Reading and Royal Holloway as part of engaging with Higher Education. We also have students signed up for the Maiden Erlegh Ski Trip in Year 8.  

In the next year, we are hoping to offer all of the opportunities already mentioned, as well as a Theatre Trip into London, a visit to Wellington Country Park and Careers workshops at KPMG. 

As River Academy grows, and our curriculum develops, the range of trips and visits will widen further. There are already plans for a Battlefields Trip in Year 9!