School portraits | 10 March 2016

Sir William Borlase

 
Parents fight tooth and claw to make sure that their house is in the right catchment area to get into Buckinghamshire’s excellent state schools. Many of the former grammar schools — including this one, RGS High Wycombe and Wycombe High School — are now Academies, but they are no less popular or successful. This co-educational grammar is based in the leafy town of Marlow only yards from the Thames. It has its own boat club and school rowing teams regularly win national championships and compete at Henley Regatta. The academic results are superb, too: 82 per cent of last year’s A-level results were B or higher, with 75 per cent A*s or A at GCSE and a 100% A*-C pass rate.

Bruern Abbey

 
Schools for little boys all seem to offer rugby, Latin, matrons and tea-time toast. Bruern, however, has a very specific USP: it is the only prep school in the country whose specific purpose is to help boys with learning difficulties, including dyslexia and dyspraxia, to make the transition to mainstream secondary schools. The top two years focus solely on the Common Entrance syllabus, while the junior school (eight to 11) has a skills-based curriculum to get literacy and numeracy skills up to scratch, with twice as many maths and English classes than a standard prep school. Laptop computers are used in most lessons and class sizes are deliberately small. Although the CE exams are the main focus, the school also has 30 acres of grounds in Bicester, Oxfordshire, with fly-fishing, gardening and other activities, as well as its own manor house in France.

Christ’s Hospital School

 
It was founded in 1552, and has a unique uniform that includes a full-length blue coat and knee breeches.