Schools Autumn 2026

On 31 August, one of England’s oldest schools closed its doors forever, after almost 14th centuries. A thread connecting modern Britain to its past has been quietly severed.  Thetford Grammar’s origins can be traced back to ad 631 when King Sigebert of East Anglia founded a monastery on the site. Two of its classrooms are named after Dean Bund and Bishop Herbert De Losinga, who wrote about the school in c. 1114. Despite a hiatus in 1496, education continued in 1566 with the re-founding by Sir Richard Fulmerston.  The main school site holds within it a great deal of history too. The ruins of the old Blackfriars monastery are woven into the later buildings, and an 11th-century depiction of the tree of life sits over the doors to Old School.

What is Eton? OK, fine, a school. What else? To some, it is a refuge. Prince William said he felt like ‘just another student’ there. To others, it is a chore. Ian Fleming left a year early, removed over an illicit dalliance with a woman. To a few people, some more fictional than others, Eton means everything. Captain Hook’s last words were ‘Floreat Etona’, ‘May Eton flourish’, the school’s motto. And in many, it provokes envy. Etonians are ‘completely detached, deliberately detached’ from reality, LBC’s James O’Brien said recently. He only went to Ampleforth. Eton has long been defined by other people: by its alumni and their reputations, and by its critics. Now the school wants to tell its own story.

Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils in the 2025 Ucas application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state schools – grammars, sixth-form colleges and others – compete with independents. Of the 80 schools, 33 are independent (three more than last year), 21 are grammars or partially selective (four fewer), 23 are sixth-form or further-education colleges (two more) and three are comprehensives or academies (one fewer). Schools are ranked by the number of offers received, then by their offer-to-application ratio.

A school pet saved my sister’s life. At our Sussex prep school, pupils took turns to take Hobnob, the classroom hamster, home for a week to look after him. When it was our go, my sister and I would fight over who got to feed him. One evening, at Hobnob’s dinner time, the two of us raced full pelt across the house to be the first to get to his cage. She tripped and whacked her head very hard on the stone kitchen floor. My mother took her to hospital for a scan, just in case. There was no sign of concussion, but the scan revealed something unexpected – hydrocephalus, water on the brain, which is fatal if left untreated. My sister had the operation later that year. Hobnob, then, was responsible for a great good, albeit indirectly. But do many schools have a Hobnob equivalent today?

About halfway through my first term at Durham University, I made a breakthrough: I had taught myself to like coffee. And with it came the flirting, lecture decoding and friendship debriefing that could be done over a skinny latte in Caffè Nero on Silver Street. That was nearly 20 years ago. Nowadays, sixth-formers have a head start on café culture. At Canford School in Dorset, pupils slide out of A-level English and on to a bar stool in the newly opened ‘The Hub’, armed with a flat white (real-deal barista coffee, made by pupils). At Brighton College there’s ‘The Club’ – dark-green floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Habitat-esque light fittings – and ‘Scott’s Café’ with artisan coffee.

If I told you that Ofsted had lost its soul, you might be surprised that it ever had one. You might also wonder why it matters. As someone teaching when Ofsted was introduced, and who has been subject to seven inspections under seven different frameworks, five of them as a headteacher of a comprehensive, I’ve discovered that it does matter. Over the years, I fought the good fight on each occasion, and in the process, I learnt to respect my opponent. Not this time, however. This time, two days of fraught psychological drama came to an end of frustration and lament. School inspectors are powerful but, in my experience, mostly well-motivated. At its best, Ofsted has been about setting standards, not accepting excuses.

And ever the twain shall meet Liaisons between Harrovians and Downe House girls at socials – on and off campus – have long been commonplace but the match is now official. From this month, the two single-sex boarding schools will form a structural partnership whereby they will retain their distinct identities and traditions but there will be a new programme of joint academic, co-curricular and social activities. ‘This partnership is also an investment in our staff and in educational excellence,’ says Emma McKendrick, Downe House’s headmistress of nearly 30 years. ‘For all who work at our schools there will be opportunities to share knowledge, technology and resources.

Since January, at least five boarding schools have announced their closure – including Thetford Grammar in Norfolk, which traces its origins to ad 631, and Rendcomb College in Gloucestershire, the alumni of which includes Kojo Annan, the businessman son of Kofi, and retired champion jockey Richard Dunwoody. These closures are nothing compared with 2025 which saw a bonfire of private schools. Some 51 ‘mainstream’ establishments announced their demise (in addition to more than a dozen special schools). Such schools could help children break free from patterns of behaviour in places where hope has gone The cause, as you’ll know, is Rachel Reeves’s decision to slap 20 per cent VAT on private education in the 2024 Budget, as well as the end of business rates relief.

Just after Christmas, I was standing in our woodshed, filling a barrow with logs, when my wife appeared at the door and told me our school was closing. A local tragedy. Nothing seismic in the scheme of things. It was a very small school, just 150 students – a special place, as all good schools are – except there was something unique about it, too. For 850 years it had educated the choristers who sing in Exeter Cathedral. Now the school was closing, and as my wife read out the letter on her phone, I had the feeling that something magical had been lost. Exeter Cathedral School (ECS) sat next to the cathedral, a partnership going back to the Normans. Together they survived the Black Death, the dissolution of the monasteries, the Civil War and two world wars.

I was educated in the 1990s, first at a country prep school and then at Eton, and have a clear memory of how my schools communicated with my parents. Basically, they didn’t. They received a letter before the start of each term and some written reports at the end and that was it. If Eton sent your parents a letter in the middle of term it almost certainly meant you had suffered a mortal injury or been expelled. What Eton did do was publish a small pale-green pocket almanac called Fixtures which listed every sporting match in the calendar but also contained essential information such as the courtesy titles of any sons of dukes at the school and the colours of the 4th XV.

Ian Rankin It has to be Marcia Blaine School for Girls as depicted in my favourite novel, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It was closely based on the Edinburgh school that Spark herself attended. She was ‘the class dreamer’ and would later refashion the school, its pupils and teachers to create a perfect short novel about friendship, growing up, dangerous charisma and betrayal. Stephen Fry          There’ll always be a soft spot for Greyfriars School in my heart. The common room where the Fat Owl of the Remove, Billy Bunter, ‘frowsts’ and thinks of cake. Growing up, another favourite was the title school in The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s by the now sadly forgotten Talbot Baines Reed.

Worse ideas have been had at 30,000ft. On a flight more than 30 years ago, an aspiring young author had a thought and wrote four words on the first piece of paper that came to hand: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin. J.K. Rowling had just drafted the house system for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on an aeroplane sick bag. Each house, named after the founders of the school, had its own character and the children would be placed there by the Sorting Hat in a millinery Myers-Briggs test. Gryffindors were brave, Hufflepuffs were loyal duffers, Ravenclaws were hard--working and clever, and Slytherins were devious snakes. Or, as the Hogwarts staff room may consider them: gods, plods, spods and sods.

Dear fee-paying parents (if I may), Forgive me for addressing you as one large, homogenous group. It sounds terribly pompous, doesn’t it – in the style of one of those endless missives St Paul kept sending to the Corinthians. Frankly, I think he should have put a sock in it after penning number one, giving us the best wedding reading there is and leaving it at that. But I’m getting distracted. Much like the Corinthians, you might well be thinking, ‘Just sod off – you don’t know us’, and you’d be right. Though what I do know, as a former prep-school mother myself, is there are at least as many types of fee-paying parents as there have been education secretaries in the past ten years (also ten, in case you’ve lost count).

St Leonards, Scotland St Leonards is a coeducational day and boarding school for pupils aged four to 18 in the heart of St Andrews. It is Scotland’s only school to offer the full International Baccalaureate continuum, taking pupils from the primary years programme through to the diploma. The results are impressive. This year, 88 per cent of higher-level grades were awarded at 7-5, equivalent to A*-B at A-level, while pupils achieved an average diploma score of 35 points – roughly equivalent to three As. Headmaster Simon Brian says pupils leave not only with strong results but ‘the skills and attributes needed to genuinely flourish at university and in life beyond’. Fees start at £7,466 per term for day pupils and £14,933 for boarders.

Early in 1968, when I was just 13, my father came home one evening with a letter in his hand and an uncomfortable look on his face. ‘You’ve won a big scholarship…’ Long pause. ‘…to Glenalmond.’ ‘But you promised I was going to St Edward’s,’ I protested. St Edward’s was the principal school in the scholarship scheme in which I was indeed a big winner. We had been to see its red-brick campus in Oxford and I was braced for my first boarding experience there. But Glenalmond? Where was it anyway? We had to find it in a road atlas, 300 miles away in rural Perthshire.