School portraits: snapshots of three notable schools

Trinity School, Croydon

Headmaster Alasdair Kennedy says he wants students to leave the school ‘without any sense of entitlement, but with a humility that acknowledges the fact there is always more to learn and others to learn from’. The former grammar school, which accepts boys from the age of ten, now offers a co-educational Sixth Form, in a state-of-the-art building opened by Boris Johnson in 2012. More than half of parents do not pay the full fees of £20,437 per year due to scholarships and bursaries. This summer, 84 per cent of students got into their first choice university, with almost half of all grades awarded being A*s. The school’s co-curriculum is exceptional: there are more than 100 clubs and societies, and the boys’ choir has performed at Glyndebourne, the Royal Opera House and the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

Bryanston School, dorset

[Photo credit: Matt Austin]

There can’t be many schools in a more beautiful place. Amid 400 acres of land, Bryanston is set in a neo-Georgian country house, where it educates around 800 boys and girls from 13 to 18, both boarding and day. It was the first school to adopt the Dalton Plan at the start of the last century, which aimed to give students more independence and individualised learning. It is dedicated to a liberal ethos: the school refers to its ‘commitment to individuality’, which it calls the ‘Bryanston Method’. Each pupil meets with a pastoral tutor once a week, whom they stay with for their five years. The school also has no uniform, with pupils instead adopting a ‘smart dress code’. Students go to top universities, including Cambridge, Edinburgh and UCL, plus music conservatoires, art school and JPMorgan apprenticeships.

Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge

This co-educational sixth form’s academic record is remarkable. As Spectator Schools reveals on p7, 69 Hills students received offers from Oxford and Cambridge this year out of 300 applicants – making it the most successful state school in the country. Hills, which has achieved an ‘Outstanding’ ranking from Ofsted since its first inspection in 2001, educates more than 2,000 pupils, with an additional 3,675 part-time students in its adult education programme. They are an enterprising lot: students raised £389,000 for charities in their Social Action Week this summer. Principal Jo Trump says: ‘Our students enjoy a learning environment that is designed to engage, inspire and challenge them and to prepare them exceptionally well for the next stage of their lives.’