An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
After three years of theatrical um-ing and ah-ing, the Prince and Princess of Wales have seemingly acceded to the obvious: Prince George is apparently going to Eton. Despite their perennial posturing at being a ‘modern’ royal family (is there such a thing?) there was really only one option. Eton is after all – somewhat paradoxically
The recent ‘school wars’ farrago was an act of madness – or, more accurately, Madness. ‘All the kids have gone away/Gone to fight with next door’s school/Every term that is the rule’. So the Camden ska band sang on ‘Baggy Trousers’, their 1980 classic about their school days. Schoolchildren organising to duff up their contemporaries is not new; social media
I can still just about recall the exact angle of rotation required of the metal hymn-book casings in the Tonbridge School chapel to produce a piercing scraping sound – perfect for putting any preacher off his stride. God, as St Paul tells us, is not mocked, and as I ascended the pulpit when I returned
The godson of a friend of mine started at Eton last Michaelmas, and she recently told me how wonderfully it was suiting him. He’s a boy who has suffered from some academic and behavioural challenges, but very quickly these seem to have been ironed out. That school really knows its onions, my friend said. Of
Woodcote House, an all-boys’ independent preparatory school of 76 pupils, closed its doors for the last time on 4 July last year. Asked by the editor to write an elegy for the school, I set about making enquiries. Many ran cold. The website had been shut down. Requests to friends who lived in Surrey fizzled
Ancient Greek, once central to a western European education, is on life support. Last summer, 206 pupils sat an A-level in ancient Greek. Of those, only a handful were state-educated. So it’s farewell to the language taught in our schools since the 16th century. Farewell to the language of the New Testament; the language Roman
The 2005 election campaign was brutal. All the major parties succumbed to infighting, the hustings were hostile and the drip-drip of poisonous briefings reached a nadir when a Ukip candidate was compared to Hitler. One special adviser was found crying in the loos. More than two decades may have passed, but the Sherborne School mock
I may be biased because I teach it, but history of art A-level often feels like the greatest, yet most dismally undervalued, subject in the curriculum. It explores history’s most innovative thinkers, enhances visual literacy, teaches history through the prism of creativity and emotion, sharpens critical thinking, and fosters empathy and open-mindedness. Yet it languishes
Is the page finally beginning to turn on children and screens? For the first time since the advent of social media, we are seeing a burgeoning alliance across all political divides to protect children from digital harm. In 2024 Jonathan Haidt delivered an urgent manifesto for change in The Anxious Generation, and at the beginning
‘This is the future, my wife says./ We are already there, and it’s the same/ as the present.’ So begins Ciaran O’Driscoll’s poem ‘Please Hold’, about a husband talking to a telephone robot and becoming ever more frustrated at the mind-numbing automation of modern-day life. There’s a lot of ‘Your call is important to us’
In my mind, there was always a sense of hubris in the air of our tucked-away offices at the Chronicle, Eton’s main student magazine. As in many other domains of our school’s life, we idly assumed ours was the first, as well as the only really consequential, example of a public-school magazine. The early 2000s,
As university admissions have become increasingly obsessed with equal outcomes, many parents fear a kind of reverse discrimination. They worry that a Ucas form bearing the name of an independent school may be bad news for an Oxbridge application. There’s evidence to suggest they’re right. Private-school pupils who transfer to state education after their GCSEs
He’s 12 next month, my eldest son, but he’s rejected the ‘movie night’ party I’ve suggested, and he doesn’t want any of his new friends from senior school to come for a sleepover. And I know why. Our television is a modest one, not the size of one of the screens flanking the main stage
Here’s some life advice Ralph Allwood gives to the teenagers who attend his week-long residential Rodolfus Choral Courses, held all through the summer at various schools and colleges across the country. Some of the singers are being pressured by their parents to take just maths and sciences, or other lucrative career-oriented subjects, for A-level or
You’d be hard pressed to find a more continuous strand in British culture than the chorister. They’ve been warbling in Westminster Abbey since the 1380s. Every national occasion is marked by choirs, the choristers dazzling in their splendidly anachronistic ruffs and robes, present at moments of collective joy or sadness. Funerals, memorial services, royal weddings,
Hurtwood House, Surrey Set in the Surrey Hills, Hurtwood House is England’s only independent boarding school exclusively for sixth-formers. Renowned for its performing arts, the school’s annual Christmas musical is no ordinary affair. The ten-night production is staged with a full West End orchestra and professional directors, choreographers and lighting designers. It is no surprise
Every boy longs to see his school burn down and for me the dream came true twice. In February 1977, I was walking to Sunday Mass when I spotted a cluster of teachers at the school gates. The old Victorian hall had caught fire overnight and collapsed. I couldn’t believe it. This was my personal
Another day, another report on how many children have had to leave their private schools, thanks to Labour’s VAT raid on fees. This particular survey, by wealth management firm, Saltus, found that almost one in ten parents have had to take their children out of the independent sector altogether while 65 per cent of those questioned admitted to
In Terence Rattigan’s 1948 play The Browning Version (filmed in 1951 starring Michael Redgrave), a public-school classics teacher called Arthur Crocker-Harris is appalled to discover that he is known to his pupils as ‘the Himmler of the Fifth’. According to the Guardian and the BBC, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was a fan of
There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school. It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At
Another week, another government offensive against childhood obesity. This time it’s a fresh round of pleas for new levies on junk food. And right on cue, out come the sympathetic pundits with a familiar lament: the poor simply can’t afford to eat well. Carrots are unaffordable and broccoli is a luxury that only the middle
To a certain extent, all doctoral theses are a bit ridiculous – and therein lies their genius. I am allowed to say this because I spent four years of my life researching French Catholicism’s engagement with the first world war for my doctoral thesis, which I nattily entitled Calvary or Catastrophe? Back then, I was
Now that the autumn term is well underway at universities and freshers’ week has removed its leering, spotty face from the calendar for another year, may I talk about how ghastly it is? Impressionable young people who believe they are completely mature adults but still have another decade or so of brain remodelling to go
Elitism has had a bad press in recent years. The concept has, alas, been tainted by its association with the numerous elites who have corrupted it by allowing self-interest and prejudice to become self-perpetuating. It’s been sullied by its association with old school ties and masonic-style handshakes – by closed networks which work to exclude
Britain is to get a new ‘super university’, an enormous centre of higher learning that will, from the next academic year, under a single vice-chancellor, educate some 50,000 students. Under the cumbersome name the ‘London and South East Universities Group’, the new university is a merger of the existing University of Greenwich and the cash-strapped
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
In the next couple of weeks, hundreds of thousands of young people will be heading off to university. They’ll be bracing themselves for the wholesale regret that freshers’ week will undoubtedly precipitate, and possibly contemplating attending a lecture or two. But among their number there will be some who got nothing like the requisite grades
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
Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils in the 2024 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 independent schools. Of the 80 schools, 30 are independent (one more than