Ready for Anything. Entirely Themselves.

That habit does not stop at Year 8. Question before answer, argument before conclusion, the right to be wrong and then to be right in a different way, that is simply how a lesson here tends to run wherever the subject allows it. It is a different way of teaching, and now and then a less comfortable one, but a pupil taught this way tends to ask better questions than they did the year before. They are considerably less frightened of what they do not yet know, because they have discovered, through practice rather than being told, that not knowing is where learning begins. 

Parents ask, reasonably, what we offer which other schools cannot. My honest answer is attention that is specific rather than general: a teacher who could describe, without opening a file, what kind of person your child is becoming, and a community that may have known that child for some years already, so the move into Senior School feels less like arriving among strangers and more like carrying on with something already begun. We ask our pupils to take real risks in a place where the stakes are genuinely low enough to learn from because the world waiting for them once they leave us is not one we can map on their behalf and the surest preparation for the future is the confidence to work out what to do when they meet something nobody warned them about. 

None of that comes at the expense of rigour. Our GCSE and A Level results are strong, and we are proud of it but we have never thought the result was the sole point of what we do here, only ever its outcome. A league table position tells you how a year group performed, in aggregate, on one day. It does not tell you whether a particular child was stretched at the level that suited them, or what happened to the pupil who found Year 10 genuinely difficult. Or what we did about it, and whether it worked. There is a real difference between a pupil who does well because they have been drilled for the exam, and one who does well because they have actually understood the subject. The first produces a good result. The second produces someone who goes on learning after the exam is over. It is the second thing we are interested in. 

Mr Paget-Tomlinson, Headmaster