Schools

Today

Flora Watkins

Back-to-school photos have become a vulgar wealth flex

How was National Standing on Doorsteps Week for you? For most, it’s a case of grabbing a picture two or even three days after la rentrée, when you remember that you’ve missed the annual obligation to record the progress of what Mumsnetters call the ‘DCs’ (darling children). Assemble them by the front door, roar at the one who’s kicking off to SMILE and look at ME, lament that you failed to get your sons’ hair cut before they went back as overnight they’ve come to resemble Hamburg-era Beatles, press the button and then bundle them into the car. Later, you ping the picture around the family WhatsApp group and stick

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator Schools: autumn 2025

In this week’s Spectator Schools supplement, Ysenda Maxtone Graham interviews Sir Nicholas Coleridge as he completes his first year as Provost of Eton. He speaks to her about the changing face of the school, Labour’s ‘pernicious’ tax on learning and the possibility of admitting girls (‘Never say never’).  In The Spectator’s Oxbridge files, we reveal a league table showing how well state schools – grammars, sixth-form colleges and others – compete with independent schools when it comes to Oxford and Cambridge offers.  Elsewhere in the supplement, Lara Prendergast turns her eyes to the heavens at Marlborough’s observatory, Lara Brown investigates how boarding schools are dealing with the smartphone menace and Harry

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Star pupils: aiming high with Marlborough’s astronomy students

As I trudge up to Marlborough’s observatory, near the top of the playing fields, I’m transported back to my time as a pupil here. I studied astronomy for GCSE, which meant spending many evenings at the observatory, gazing at the night sky. The Blackett Observatory, which houses a superb Cooke 10in refractor telescope, celebrates its 90th anniversary this month. I’ve been invited back by my tutor Jonathan Genton, former head of science and teacher of the GCSE astronomy course, and Gavin James, director of the observatory, who oversees the astronomy programme. ‘Everybody should study astronomy,’ says James. ‘It’s the original science.’ Some pupils would even stay the night in the

Gus Carter Gus Carter

The false economy of cutting the Combined Cadet Force

What could be more fun for a 14-year-old boy than messing about in the woods with a gun? My school’s Combined Cadet Force offered precisely that, marching us through the Brecon Beacons and organising mock skirmishes with SA80 rifles (albeit using blanks). When we weren’t trying to shoot each other, we were fighting over OS maps and compasses, trying to find which bit of woodland we were supposed to be sleeping in. One group found a dead body on the side of a Welsh mountain. Another spent an evening drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes with a strange man in a caravan. At some point in the small hours, he got

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Sir Nicholas Coleridge: ‘Girls at Eton? Never say never’

T he historic graffiti at Eton College, chiselled into its stone walls, wooden panelling and ancient oak desks, serves as a reminder to any Etonian that he’s merely the latest in a long line of boys stretching back to 1440 who have passed through the school and occasionally bent the rules. Two names chiselled together into a wall of the Cloisters are ‘H. COLERIDGE’ and ‘E. COLERIDGE’. ‘Not me!’ says Sir Nicholas Coleridge, Eton’s 43rd Provost, when I visit him on the last day of the summer term, ‘or any of my sons. They’re dated 1817, luckily, so we can’t be blamed.’ ‘The imposition of VAT has been a very

Flora Watkins

Pity the poor offspring of the pushy Pollys

What do tech bros and pushy parents have in common? They’re both fond of citing Samuel Beckett’s most famous quote: ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ For parents, the line is invariably deployed when their ‘gifted’ child has underwhelmed at a crucial juncture. Let’s park the inconvenient fact that Beckett’s line has nothing to do with self-help. Just go with it and nod sympathetically while inwardly enjoying their elaborate contortions in an attempt to save face. Perhaps my favourite example is a West London mother (we’ll call her Polly). Her boy’s failure to get into Cambridge (‘It wouldn’t have been the right place for him anyway, so we’re pretty relieved!’) has proved

Lara Brown

Should boarding schools be phone-free?

No development has shaken up the cloistered and carefully controlled world of English boarding school life quite as much as the invention of the smartphone. Traditionally, schoolboys might write home once a week. Perhaps they might be able to smuggle in a dirty magazine or other contraband, but for the most part boarders on school grounds were safely tucked away. Today, thanks to smartphones, children are sent to school with access to pornography, internet chatrooms and easy contact with their parents. What horrors might a group of 13-year-olds get up to in a dorm if left unattended with internet access? Should boarding school children be permitted to phone home each

Jo Thomson

The independent schools crisis is only just beginning

Ever since the sudden and cruel imposition of VAT on independent school fees at the start of the year, much of the media focus has been on the number of school closures. The first to go have been prep schools and schools in rural areas far from London and the south-east. Trust me, this is really only the beginning. Savvy parents have always known a reduction in those shiny buildings won’t matter that much in the end Only a very small number of independent schools will be completely immune from the current financial pressures and – in the next couple of years – that will start to become increasingly obvious.

Patrick Kidd

The joy of school cricket

Few presidents can claim such an immediate success. At the end of June, I became president of my school’s alumni association and then, just five days later, the First XI won their first match at the annual Royal Grammar Schools’ Cricket Festival since 2017. A coincidence? Well, obviously. But I’d like to think that Colchester’s youth drew confidence from me having a net at the school field on Old Colcestrians’ Day and getting hit on the bonce by the first ball I faced from the sixty something head of Year 12. If this is how poorly the alumni play, they will have thought, we can’t be all that bad. I

Harry Mount

Vivat the Latin motto

In the strange, arcane world of school mottoes, it’s fitting that the most famous one of all belongs to a fictional school. Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus – ‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’ – is the motto of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. J.K. Rowling brilliantly realised that children aren’t put off by boarding schools and the ancient rituals that go with them. They’re gripped by these peculiar places, their roots twisting back through the mists of time. And no school custom is as ancient or beguiling as the Latin motto. My motto, at Westminster School, was Dat deus incrementum – ‘God gives the increase’. It is a motto

Eleanor Doughty

How boarding schools reinvented themselves

Early in his time at Eton College, 13-year-old William Waldegrave, the school’s future provost, was struggling to sleep. He told his dame, and she in turn told the housemaster, John ‘A.J.’ Marsden. The former commando in charge of the boys told Waldegrave that if it happened again, he should knock on his door. A few nights later, the boy did as he was told. Marsden had a solution – they would go for a run, to Bray, seven miles from Eton. Waldegrave slept better that night. Tales of public schools past are legion – some better than fiction, and plenty that have inspired it. Others are less appealing, more appalling.

Anastasia Broder

Long live eccentric school traditions

On every Shrove Tuesday since at least 1753, boys at Westminster School have gathered in the hall for a mad scramble over a pancake. The Pancake Greaze (pictured) is a cherished tradition that sees one pupil crowned the winner for grabbing the biggest portion, which the cook tosses into the centre of the hall from a height of 15ft, as the rest of the school cheers on. The champion is awarded a golden coin by the Dean of Westminster, accompanied by the headmaster and sometimes royal visitors. The more unsavoury part of the tradition – nominally beating the cook with Latin primers if he fails to get the pancake over

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

Lancing College, West Sussex Lancing is a public boarding school for children aged 13 to 18 in West Sussex. Set within the South Downs National Park, it offers an open-air theatre, a state-of-the-art music school, an equestrian centre and even the tallest school chapel in the world. As impressive as its facilities, though, are its alumni: Evelyn Waugh, Sir David Hare and Lord (Stephen) Green to name but a few. Nowadays, many students at the college – where fees start from £12,602 – come from its sister preparatory schools in Hove and Worthing. Also arriving this month is a new headteacher, Dr Scott Crawford, who will replace Dominic Oliver after

William Atkinson

The school tie renaissance

In the street across the road from my third-year Christ Church room, sat a pub called The Bear. It marketed itself as Oxford’s oldest inn – as so many of the city’s hostelries do – but it is most famous for its tie collection. More than 4,500 are on display, enclosed in cases around the walls. The collection began in 1952, when the landlord offered half a pint to anyone who would let him snip off a tie end. To qualify, the ties had to indicate membership of some institution: a club, college, regiment, sports team or school. Over the decades, a cornucopia of colours, stripes and logos has been

Philip Womack

Why do people feel sorry for me for going to boarding school aged nine?

Sometimes, when I’m chatting about childhood, at some point it will become clear I went to a boarding school from the age of nine. Reactions can be comical. ‘You poor thing!’ an interlocutor might gasp, gripping my forearm, no doubt picturing cold showers and cruelty. I’ve always responded with bemusement, since my experience largely featured comfort and crumpets. I loved my prep school – Dorset House in West Sussex. It was a world in itself, enclosed and beguiling. In some ways it was unchanging, such as the graffitied Latin primers which were the same our grandparents had used. Yet it could be surprisingly forward-looking, as when it made a satellite

Thursday

Madeline Grant

The ADHD racket

In 1620, in the Staffordshire market town of Bilston, a teenage boy decided he didn’t much fancy going to school. Rather than resort to conventional methods, 13-year-old William Perry claimed that he was possessed by a demon. His symptoms included reacting with spasms to the reading of the first verse of St John’s Gospel and peeing blue urine. Thousands flocked to Bilston to witness his supposed possession. King James I, who wrote a book on necromancy and black magic, took a personal interest in the case. It was only when the Bishop of Coventry had the bright idea of reading him the equivalent scriptural passage in Greek – a language

The Spectator

Is Angela Rayner pushing up house prices?

By George There is a popular movement to fly St George’s flags from lampposts. The St George Cross was used as an emblem of Henry II of England and Philip II of France during the Third Crusade in 1189. From 1218 it was used as the flag of Genoa, and in 1348 became a flag used by the English royal family. Some others using it today: — Georgia: national flag incorporates a large St George’s Cross with a smaller one in each quadrant; Sardinia: St George’s cross with a Moor’s head in each quadrant; Barcelona: St George’s crosses in two quadrants, with stripes in the other; naval flags of Bahamas,

Monday

Alec Marsh

Let’s slash the school summer holiday

There are three little words that strike horror into the heart of every parent of school-age children. They are the words that cause you to break out in a cold sweat or let out a moan in your sleep in the dead of night – even in the middle of winter. They are ‘school summer holidays’. Hear those three words and you may very well envisage jubilant children spewing from the school gates and then remember the dim, distant sun-kissed summers of your own youth. But mention them within earshot of a parent of appropriately aged offspring and you’ll see the light go out in their eyes. Oh yes, the

Mark Mason

Don’t call me ‘Mr’

‘Please call me Mark,’ I’ve always said to the teachers at my son’s school. ‘If you call me “Mr Mason” it makes me feel 85 – and if I call you “Mrs Smith” it makes me feel seven.’ I know their first names, and always use them, in emails, phone calls and in person. A few return the compliment, but most keep it formal. It feels wrong, putting distance between us when we’re having a conversation, often an in-depth and important one, about my only child. The best teachers and staff have taught me fascinating things about how to deal with Barney. I’ve only been a parent once; they’ve encountered

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Our private schools are China’s next target

Ka-shing in Sir: Ian Williams highlights (‘Chasing the dragon’, 3 May) the degree to which the Chinese state has acquired interests in the UK. Yet he overlooks a few tentacles of the Asian octopus that have curled around my home region of eastern England. Swathes of high-quality arable land are being subsumed into solar farms, panels for which are manufactured in China. The resultant electricity will be distributed by UK Power Networks, controlled, as Ian points out, by Li Ka-shing. East Anglia’s biggest brewer, Greene King, has been China-owned since 2019, held by Li Ka-shing through CK Asset Holdings. Our government seems craven in its attempts to lure Chinese fast-fashion