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David Howard · CC BY-SA 2.0Set on 128 acres of Surrey, ACS Cobham was founded in 1967 for the diplomatic and corporate families whose passports get used, and its real gift is teaching…
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Abbey College Cambridge
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Walk into Abbey College Cambridge and the first thing you notice is the absence of the usual furniture: no ancient quad, no chapel, no borrowed crest. Founded…
£28,185 per annum (Abbey House, Standard Single En Suite, excluding VAT)
Walk into Abbey College Manchester and you will not find a chapel, a quad, or a founder glowering from panelling. You will find a city college on Cheapside,…
£16,950 per annum (Standard En Suite, September – June, excluding VAT)
Jonathan Clitheroe · CC BY-SA 2.0On a working farm at the edge of Staffordshire, Abbotsholme pupils muck out and lamb in spring, learning that a living thing depends on them showing up whether…
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Racingmanager · CC BY-SA 4.0Abingdon can claim a legal document from 1100 and, more movingly, the 1256 will of Abbot John de Blosneville, who set aside money for thirteen poor scholars, a…
£19,375 per term
https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/6b/26/4de0b125172b8ebb246c846a8b60.jpg
Gallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/M0002855.html
Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-23): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ke9b39ky CC-BY-4.0 · CC BY 4.0Founded by John Fothergill in 1779 to educate Quaker children "not in affluence," Ackworth still answers to the Religious Society of Friends, and that lineage…
£37,500 per annum
Adcote School for Girls occupies a Grade I listed Norman Shaw pile outside Shrewsbury, a Victorian fever-dream of Tudor England now filled with 222 girls aged…
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John Charles Varrall · CC BY 4.0Aldenham has a fine origin story, and origin stories are exactly the sort of thing you must not mistake for a present-day culture. In 1597 the brewer Richard…
£16,995 per term
A visitor walking the valley at Ampleforth will pass a monk, and not a costumed one but a member of the Benedictine community living here since 1802. That is…
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Walk into a lesson at Appleford and you may find a child reading aloud who, a year earlier, would have done almost anything to avoid it. That small act is the…
£15,152 per term
Ardingly College
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Founded in 1858 by Nathaniel Woodard, a Victorian clergyman set on educating the middle classes in the Christian faith, Ardingly College still means it:…
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Ashford School
Map data © OpenStreetMap
Thirty-seven minutes by high-speed train separates Ashford International from St Pancras, and that single fact tells you where this Kentish school sits: close…
£17,997 per term (Full boarding, Years 10-13, inclusive of VAT and lunch)
Start with the arithmetic, because it settles everything: roughly 100 boarders among 800 pupils, on seventy agreeable acres at the edge of Harrogate. This is…
£7,795 per term
Badminton begins with a fine story: a 1930s headmistress, Beatrice May Baker, an internationalist and pacifist who filled her Bristol classrooms with refugees…
£16,565 per term (Senior School Boarder UK/EEA)
Dunpharlain · CC BY-SA 4.0There is a Latin motto carved into Barnard Castle School promising that those steeped in little things may safely attempt great ones, and to its credit that is…
£15,302.60 per term
Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0At the edge of Queen Square, in a Grade II listed building with no playing fields and no chapel bell, sits a school that has decided against almost everything…
£40,045 (+VAT) per annum
Tilman2007 · CC BY-SA 4.0The gatehouse pupils file through each morning has stood since the fourteenth century, on the ground where Harold's army broke against the Normans in 1066,…
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Bedales · CC BY-SA 4.0There is a Grade I listed barn at Bedales, raised early last century by pupils and staff in the Arts and Crafts manner, and the fact that children helped build…
£18,999 per term (international deposit equivalent; full boarding fee not explicitly stated per term on pages)
Founded on a roll of four boys in 1895, Bede's Prep now sits by the sea in Eastbourne, part of a foundation that stretches from a nursery to a sixth form a few…
£18,400 per term
Bede's Senior School has the rare distinction of being young, opening in 1979 rather than tracing its crest to some Tudor bishop, which means it has had to…
£18,400 per term
No Swan So Fine · CC BY 4.0On a fifty-acre site inside a working English town, close enough for a boy to reach the river Ouse on foot, Bedford has held its ground since 1552, and it…
£17,744 per term
Rwendland · CC BY-SA 3.0From Beechen Cliff the honey-coloured city of Bath arranges itself below like a lesson in proportion, but before any overseas family falls for the view there…
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Benenden's founding fact, full boarding seven days a week for every girl aged 11 to 18 across 250 acres of Kent, is where a family must begin, and not in the…
£21,300 (including VAT) per term
Peter Skynner · CC BY-SA 2.0There is a boy in a workshop with his sleeves pushed up, another walking past without a second glance, and that small scene tells you what Bethany, in…
£15,670 per term
Bill Boaden · CC BY-SA 2.0The Memorial Hall, raised in 1922 for the boys who never came home, still sits at the centre of Bishop's Stortford College, and that placement tells you the…
£18,060 per term
Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0Blundell's, founded in 1604 and written into English literature via *Lorna Doone*, is a country school in the truest sense rather than one with a country…
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A five-minute walk from the beach at Southbourne is not the worst way to begin a school day, and Bournemouth Collegiate has arranged itself accordingly,…
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Stuart Logan · CC BY-SA 2.0There is a working Greek theatre dug into a Berkshire hillside at Bradfield, where every three years pupils stage a play in classical Greek, in the original…
£20,250 per term
Chris Morgan · CC BY-SA 2.0The single most useful sentence a family sending a child from abroad can hold in mind is this: Brentwood is a large co-educational day school in Essex with…
£19,488 per term
Somewhere in the corridors of Brighton College a single word recurs like an institutional heartbeat: kindness. That is a striking thing to lead with at a…
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A quiet fact tells you something about Bromsgrove: as a registered charity it reinvests its fees, which is what a charity is supposed to do, though the honest…
£15,775 per term
NiceRice.B · CC BY-SA 4.0Consider the tutorial system that, on the school's account, has run at Bryanston for nearly a century, in which a pupil meets weekly, one to one, with a tutor…
£19,750 per term
Burgess Hill Girls sits on fourteen acres inside a conservation area yet a short walk from a West Sussex town with a railway station, Gatwick close and London…
£84 per night (casual/flexi boarding, inclusive of 20% VAT)
Peter Kazmierczak · CC BY-SA 2.0Canford, on 250 wooded acres near the River Stour in Dorset, is old and grand enough to have mislaid an Assyrian bas-relief behind its tuck shop for decades…
£19,073 per term including VAT
Alicehart · CC BY-SA 4.0Picture four teenagers and a tutor gathered around a chemistry problem that most schools would fling at thirty faces at once, and you have understood Cardiff…
£77,250 per annum
DGFleetwood · CC BY 4.0Somewhere in the Harestone Valley a pupil is doing something with an iPad that would baffle their grandparents and quietly impress an engineer, and technology…
£20,170 per term
Mertbiol · CC0Founded in 1611 by Thomas Sutton, who spent part of his fortune building a school and an almshouse under one roof, Charterhouse invites the honest test that…
£21,015 per term
Cheltenham College
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Cheltenham College builds monuments to its own continuity, and the Chapel of St Mary and St George, dedicated in 1896 to a design by an old boy, tells you as…
£20,558 inc VAT per term (Lower College, Years 9–11)
David Dixon · CC BY-SA 2.0A child arrives at Chetham's already able to do what most adults cannot: play well enough that a stranger stops to listen. That is the sorting principle here,…
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Jammydodger · CC BY-SA 3.0Chigwell is best understood not as a destination boarding campus but as a strong London-edge day school with a small boarding community attached, and that…
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Jaggery · CC BY-SA 2.0A November 2024 Estyn inspection found that pupils here "demonstrate exemplary manners and celebrate each other's achievements with sincerity and enthusiasm,"…
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Graeme.duckworth · CC BY-SA 4.0Every school tour eventually blurs into one long corridor of oak panelling and earnest mission statements, but no family forgets Christ's Hospital, where all…
£16,480 per term (full boarding, Year 10–13)
Johan VAN DIJK · CC BY-SA 2.0Clayesmore has been folded into its patch of Dorset countryside since 1933, and it talks the familiar boarding language of values and the whole child, an aim…
£16,503.60 per term (Year 9 to Year 13)
Derek Harper · CC BY-SA 2.0The Memorial Arch at Clifton College carries the name of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, a difficult figure to venerate, but take it as evidence of an old…
£19,835 per term
Mertbiol · CC0Begin not with the 280 handsome Surrey acres, which can flatter any school that empties on a Friday, but with a number that governs everything: the published…
£60,540 per annum (inclusive of VAT)
John Goldsmith · CC BY-SA 2.0Set in 480 acres of Suffolk parkland around an eighteenth-century mansion, Culford is a school with room, and that is its first fact and its first caution.…
£16,490 per term (Senior Full Boarding, exc. catering)
Stuart Logan · CC BY-SA 2.0Dauntsey's owns the Jolie Brise, a 1913 gaff-rigged pilot cutter that once won the Fastnet, which tells you what this school on the edge of Salisbury Plain…
£49,200 per annum (£16,400 per term)
Chris Heaton · CC BY-SA 2.0Founded in 1886 under a Latin motto meaning God's word is a guiding light, Dean Close still treats its Christian foundation as the load-bearing wall of the…
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Above the Staffordshire fields, where the county hands you over to Derbyshire, sits a Victorian pile with a chapel at its heart, and it is that chapel a family…
£15,526.80 per term (Year 10, 11 & Sixth Form Full Boarding)
Downe House
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Downe House, a girls' boarding school near Thatcham of 559 pupils spanning eleven to eighteen, knows precisely what it is and has not reinvented itself with…
£21,076 per term
Neil Owen · CC BY-SA 2.0Downside's Abbey Church at Stratton-on-the-Fosse rises out of the Somerset countryside like a cathedral that took a wrong turn and stayed, and it is the…
£17,995 per term
David Howard · CC BY-SA 2.0The library at Dulwich College holds a first folio of Shakespeare and the papers of Edward Alleyn, the actor-manager who founded the place in 1619 and endowed…
£22,472 per term
Teach46 · CC BY 3.0Set on a hillside across the Wear from Durham Cathedral, this is one of English education's more dramatic addresses, with a foundation traceable to the…
£18,225 per term (Full Boarding, Senior School Years 9–13)
David Hawgood · CC BY-SA 2.0Founded in 1855 by Dr John Propert to house and educate the widows and orphans of medical men, Epsom College carries a charitable inheritance and two words,…
£19,544 per term
Steve Daniels · CC BY-SA 2.0Somewhere in Windsor, a thirteen-year-old is being taught by a man he must call "beak", in a house shared with fifty others, wearing a tailcoat that has looked…
£21,891 per Half (term) including VAT
Sophy W at Felsted · CC BY-SA 4.0Richard Lord Riche, who founded Felsted in 1564, was a Lord Chancellor whose testimony helped send Thomas More to the scaffold, but a school has four and a…
£19,225 per term
Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0Fettes rises from its Edinburgh parkland like something a Gothic novelist dreamed up after a heavy supper, all turrets and finials, and yes, it is the school…
£18,850 per Term (inclusive of VAT)
Adrian S Pye · CC BY-SA 2.0There is a moat at Framlingham, though it belongs to the twelfth-century Norman castle looming over the school's northern edge rather than the College itself,…
£17,480 per term
Des Blenkinsopp · CC BY-SA 2.0On a wall somewhere at Godolphin hangs the name Elizabeth Godolphin, who nearly three centuries ago decided girls deserved an education when almost nobody in…
£13,900 per term
Gresham's School
Map data © OpenStreetMap

The most telling thing about Gresham's may be a building that does not yet exist: a Dyson-funded STEM campus due in 2027, a promise rather than a fact, and one…
£17,560 per term
franctasy · CC BY 2.0The dome arrives before anything else, a pale hemisphere adrift over Hertfordshire like something that wandered off from a cathedral, and it tells you…
£19,820 per term
Mtcv · CC BY-SA 3.0A former pupil once likened the walk between Headington's senior buildings to arriving at a small university that had somehow admitted teenagers, which is…
£18,882 per term
LearningPlock · CC BY-SA 4.0There is a chapel at the centre of Heathfield, and a chaplain on the staff, which tells you almost everything about the rhythm of a small Ascot school, around…
£18,258 per term
No Swan So Fine · CC BY-SA 4.0Walk in on a weekday morning and you may catch choristers rehearsing, unstaged, a habit this place has kept since roughly the seventh century. Hereford most…
£7,602 per term
Dave Spicer · CC BY-SA 2.0Walk onto the site at Hurstpierpoint and you will find, sooner or later, a chapel, a working part of the daily rhythm rather than a prospectus prop, and a…
£16,365 per term
The River Orwell sits at the bottom of 87 acres in Woolverstone, and a child here will come to know its moods the way a townie knows bus routes. That setting…
£50,859 per year
On the campus at Kent College Canterbury there is a working farm, an unusual thing to find at a school with a Methodist crest and a UNESCO city on its…
£18,515 per term (Years 9–13 full boarding)
A dairy herd once grazed where the sixth form now sits its exams, and Kent College Pembury still keeps a working farm outside Tunbridge Wells, though a family…
£18,183.00 per term
Mertbiol · CC0King Edward's Witley carries a striking inheritance: a founding document from 1553 that says out loud what most schools only hint at, that it exists to educate…
£16,975 per term
N Chadwick · CC BY-SA 2.0On a spit of land at the southern tip of the Isle of Man, where the Irish Sea does most of the talking, King William's College has spent nearly two centuries…
£48,900 per annum (Years 12 & 13, including VAT)
Jaggery · CC BY-SA 2.0On the 29th of September, 1519, three men stood in the Chapter House of Bruton Abbey and endowed land for a free school, and King's Bruton has been teaching in…
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Rob Purvis · CC BY-SA 2.0King's College Taunton is a Somerset school in the fullest sense, planted in a West Country market town and unembarrassed about it, and a family should start…
£16,335 per term
Geoff Ousbey · CC BY-SA 2.0Consider the paradox: a school often dated to 2019 that has in fact taught Warwick girls for more than 140 years. The 2019 date marks the move to a…
£18,773 per term (Full Boarding, incl. VAT)
Derek Harper · CC BY-SA 2.0Founded by John Wesley in 1748 for the sons of his travelling preachers, Kingswood still occupies its windy Lansdown perch above Bath, with some of the finest…
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Joggs64 · CC BY-SA 4.0Walk the sixty-five acres of parkland in Reading and you notice the quiet first, which is a fair emblem of a school the Quakers founded in 1890 and that still…
£19,500 per term (Senior, Year 9 & above, full boarder)
Jo and Steve Turner · CC BY-SA 2.0Begin with the sound: choristers rehearsing inside Lincoln Cathedral, a twelfth-century Gothic giant in whose shadow this school of roughly 500 pupils sits and…
£6,952.46 per term (Years 7–13)
Alan Hughes · CC BY-SA 2.0Begin, as everyone does, with the rugby: Llandovery reckons more than fifty former pupils have won over five hundred caps for Wales, a genuine distinction that…
£5,630 per term (Excl. VAT, Year 12/13 boarding fee; tuition fee additional)
Begin with a bequest, not a brochure. Lord Wandsworth, a Victorian financier, died in 1912 and left a fortune to educate children who had lost one or both…
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Luckley House School
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Luckley House School would happily accept the word its December 2024 inspectors chose for it: community. Small, at roughly 380 pupils from Year 7 to Year 13,…
£15,360 per term
Philip Halling · CC BY-SA 2.0At the foot of the hills that supposedly stirred Elgar and Tolkien sits a co-educational full-boarding school of around 640 pupils, aged 13 to 18, that has…
£20,505 per term
Michael Dibb · CC BY-SA 2.0At the centre of Marlborough College sits a grassed mound older than Stonehenge, some 4,500 years of it, which pupils trudge past to lessons barely glancing, a…
£21,345 per term (£64,035 per annum)
Richard Dorrell · CC BY-SA 2.0Mayfield greets a visitor not with a reception desk but with The Old Palace, a medieval building that once housed the Archbishops of Canterbury, and that…
£18,660 per term (Years 7–13, gross inc. VAT)
On a spring afternoon at Merchiston, the sound you are most likely to hear is a tennis ball struck with intent, and that tells you most of what you need to…
£17,748 per term
No Swan So Fine · CC BY-SA 4.0Founded in 1807 by Christian non-conformists locked out of the older institutions, Mill Hill began with an idea worth honouring: an excellent education for the…
£19,302 per term
A visitor to Millfield notices the sport first: the fifty-metre pool, the equestrian centre, the roll of Olympians the school has sent to the Games with a…
£20,205 per term
Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0A river runs through Monkton Combe's story, quite literally, because it sits in a fold of the Midford valley outside Bath, a school you descend into rather…
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Geoff Charles · CC BY-SA 4.0On the border where Shropshire slides into Wales sits a girls' school that has spent decades quietly persuading its pupils they are capable of more than they…
£15,834 per term
Mount Kelly
Map data © OpenStreetMap

There is a fifty-metre pool in Tavistock, and it is not there by accident: Mount Kelly sends its fastest swimmers to national and international meets, and…
£13,540 per term
New Hall occupies a Tudor palace once owned by Henry VIII, seventy red-brick acres outside Chelmsford, but the building is the least important thing about the…
See 2026/27 Senior Divisions and Sixth Form boarding fee schedules on the Fees page (exact figures shown as images only; not extractable as text)
Dave Crosby · CC BY-SA 2.0Oakham's motto borrows from Lucretius and translates as "like runners, they pass on the torch of life," which is a bracingly ambitious thing to carve onto a…
£16,235 per term (Middle & Upper School, Years 9–13)
Ben Keating · CC BY-SA 2.0Oundle leans on its laboratories, not its crest, and that tells you something. The school built the SciTec complex, one of the largest science facilities in…
£20,385 per term (Years 9–13, inc. VAT)
Stuart Logan · CC BY-SA 2.0Pangbourne began in 1917 as the Nautical College, and the naval scaffolding never came down: pupils belong to divisions rather than houses, and there is a…
£18,645 per term
Oswaldbeldridge · Public domainThere is a plaque somewhere at Plymouth College that a boy called Tom Daley walked past on his way to the pool, and an Olympic diving bronze at fourteen is the…
£14,640.00 per term (Full Boarding UK, Sixth Form)
Ian S · CC BY-SA 2.0A founder's stone laid in 1514, when Henry VIII was young, still anchors a school that has spent five centuries in one corner of East Yorkshire, and that…
£16,445 per term (Senior Years 9–13, full boarding)
Saffron Blaze · CC BY-SA 3.0From the top of its hill above Bath, Prior Park commands one of the loveliest views in British schooling, and a Palladian confidence to match. But scenery is…
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Queen Anne’s School
Map data © OpenStreetMap
On a hill above Caversham sits a girls' school of around 450 pupils that has spent well over a century educating without becoming a household name, and that…
£18,985 per term
Before anything else, understand what Queen's is not: a conventional boarding school. What sits among the brass plaques of Harley Street is a central London…
£10,914 per term
Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0A Methodist foundation from 1843, the oldest school in Taunton, Queen's promises on its wall to teach "not for school but for life", and I lean towards the…
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'Littlebluepenguin' · CC BY 2.0The tennis courts are the tell. Queenswood has ten of them and an LTA High Performance Centre, and it produces girls who play the game seriously rather than…
£18,815 per term
Andrew Gray · CC BY-SA 3.0Radley College keeps its own vocabulary, the dons and the socials, and the vocabulary tells you everything: this is a closed world with its own rules, and you…
£21,216 per term
Tim Heaton · CC BY-SA 2.0A. W. N. Pugin drew up the original plans, which tells you Ratcliffe took its Catholic identity seriously from the start and would spend on beauty rather than…
£16,782 per term
Reed's School
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Reed's begins where few schools dare to, with the Rev Dr Andrew Reed's 1813 orphan asylum, and it still carries Foundation status meant to school children who…
£15,475 per term
Michael Garlick · CC BY-SA 2.0Rendcomb began in 1920 when a tobacco heir seated bright Gloucestershire village children beside fee-payers, and the honest test of whether that instinct…
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Brian Deegan · CC BY-SA 2.0Repton wears its provenance lightly, which is more than most schools with an Augustinian priory beneath them would manage. Founded in 1557 and sunk into the…
£19,375 per term (inclusive of VAT)
Stand on the clifftop at Roedean on a grey January morning and the wind off the Channel tells you what the Lawrence sisters intended more than 125 years ago:…
£21,330 per term (Full Boarding, Year 10-13, incl. VAT)
Myself (Adrian Pingstone). · Public domainSet on a honey-stoned Bath hillside long favoured by military families, Royal High is a Girls' Day School Trust school built on a settled conviction: that…
£16,202.00 per term (Sixth Form, Years 12-13, Full Boarding)
Robin Webster · CC BY-SA 2.0On a slope above the Stour Estuary, a ship's clock still keeps naval time over 200 acres, and Royal Hospital School, founded in 1712 for the children of…
£17,033 per term
Royal Russell's most concrete boast is geography: a 110-acre parkland campus on London's southern edge, open country that stays plugged into the capital and a…
£18,198.00 per term
*Ut Prosim*, "That I may be of service," sits on the crest, and a school that leads with service is telling you what it hopes its children become before it…
£16,560 per term
Paul Gillett · CC BY-SA 2.0Founded in 1432, but forget that at once, because the interesting fact about Sevenoaks is a decision most English schools never made: it abandoned A-levels…
£20,639 per term
Sherborne Girls
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Perched on a hill above Dorset, with its brother school and the abbey for company, Sherborne Girls offers a version of single-sex education that does not…
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These are all taken by Christopher Morcom who died in 1930; therefore according to UK law it is in the public domain, since that covers anyone who died before 1956 as of 2026 (70 years). · Public domainThe abbey bells have rung over Sherborne for five hundred years, but atmosphere is not evidence, and a family posting a thirteen-year-old across an ocean…
£19,350 per term (inc. VAT)
Fernweh · CC BY-SA 2.0Picture a three-year-old from the nursery trundling past sixth-formers mid-exam, all on the same 60 acres of Hampshire, and you have grasped the first thing…
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Cross the River Severn to reach Shrewsbury and you arrive somewhere unambiguously committed to full boarding, which is the thing a family should weigh before…
£20,141 per term (Sixth Form, UK/EEA Resident, gross inc. VAT)
N Chadwick · CC BY-SA 2.0St Catherine's Bramley, near Guildford, is best understood as a Surrey girls' day school with boarding attached, not one of the seven-day houses many overseas…
£16,225 per term
Bikeboy · CC BY-SA 2.0The chapel at St Edmund's holds the relic of a hand, that of St Edmund Campion, executed at Tyburn in 1581, and it tells you what kind of institution this is…
£17,339 per term
Brakspear at English Wikipedia · Public domainOn a hill above Canterbury since 1855, its chapel first echoing to a service on 6th June 1858, St Edmund's is a school bound up with the cathedral half a mile…
£18,840 – per term
Tw2018 · CC BY-SA 4.0On a hundred acres in Summertown sits the North Wall, a professional theatre good enough to programme touring work and open to the public, and it is genuinely…
£20,576 per term
Geographer · CC BY-SA 2.0A child arrives at St Felix on 75 acres near the sea at Southwold, and the temptation is to let the coast do work a coastline cannot. Adults form children, not…
£7,204 + £5,790 per term (full boarding, Year 7–11); £7,375 + £5,790 per term (full boarding, Year 12–13)
There is a school in Ascot where the walk to the High Street takes about five minutes, which tells you something before you have read a word of its literature.…
£14,995 incl. VAT per term
Graeme Yuill · CC BY-SA 2.0St Leonards has taught on the same St Andrews ground since 1512, and it wears that history lightly, its walls close to the ruins and cobbled wynds of a small…
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For 150 years St Mary's Calne, a school of roughly 350 girls on 27 acres of Wiltshire, has done something harder than it sounds: educate young women thoroughly…
£20,346 per term
St Mary's School Cambridge traces its working life to a 1901 log book but its nerve to Mary Ward, the seventeenth-century Englishwoman jailed by the Church for…
£18,755 per term
ZeevoX · CC BY-SA 4.0Begin with the number 153, one for each fish in the miraculous draught, chosen by John Colet when he founded this school in 1509 and stipulated that boys come…
£19,181 per term
Rodhullandemu · CC BY-SA 4.0St Peter's dates its founding to 627 AD, which makes it older than the Norman Conquest and possibly the third or fourth oldest school on earth, a claim it…
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Simonmayes17 · CC BY-SA 3.0Above the front door at St Swithun's, a Winchester girls' school founded in 1884, three Latin words are carved: caritas, humilitas, sinceritas. Kindness,…
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Kim Fyson · CC BY-SA 2.0Start with the town, because Stamford is the first thing you notice and the last you forget: a honey-coloured Georgian place the school threads through rather…
£16,468 per term (Senior/Sixth Form 7-Day Boarding)
Stephen Perse Senior School
Map data © OpenStreetMap

The founder gives us the standard: Dr Stephen Perse, Fellow of Gonville & Caius, whose school opened in 1881 to widen opportunity for women rather than gild…
£19,865 per term
There is a horse on the grounds, and not in the ornamental way some country schools keep a paddock for atmosphere. Stonar stables around sixty horses and runs…
£17,300 per term
Graeme Smith · CC BY-SA 2.0The Great Academy Room at Stonyhurst keeps a copy of Sir Thomas More's manuscript and a set of relics on the estate rather than behind museum glass, which…
£17,847.45 per term (UK Full Boarding, Year 12-13, 2026-27, including VAT and lunch)
Sandy Gerrard · CC BY-SA 2.0Strathallan sits on 153 acres of Perthshire near Forgandenny, close enough to the Ochil Hills that a boy in a lineout might lose concentration, and the honest…
£15,074 per term excl. VAT / £18,089 per term inc. VAT (Senior, Third Form to Sixth Form)
Geof Sheppard · CC BY-SA 4.0Taunton has been coaching international pupils in English, and the odd baffling nuance of British life, for well over a century, which is a longer run than…
£16,995 per term (Senior/Sixth Form, 7 nights)
No Swan So Fine · CC BY-SA 4.0The green baize door at King's Canterbury opens, more often than not, onto a fragment of the Middle Ages, because boarders here live inside the precincts of…
£19,326 per term
Sixteen boys arrived on a February morning in 1875, sent by the Methodist Conference for families who wanted Cambridge without the Anglican strings; The Leys…
£18,276 per term
Set on fifty-five acres of Berkshire woodland near Ascot, The Marist is a small, values-led Catholic girls' school that draws its temperament from the Marist…
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The Mount School York
Map data © OpenStreetMap

In June 2026 the ISI reached for a phrase most schools covet and few earn, a "calm and respectful culture," and calm, being cumulative, tells you something…
£14,875 per term (UK Full, Years 9–13)
The chapel greets you first at The Oratory School, and Saint John Henry Newman, who founded the place on the conviction that education was a matter of the soul…
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A cello case in a Purcell corridor is not an accessory; it is the reason the child carrying it is here at all, and everything else, the timetable, the houses,…
£18,087 per term
Trinity Teignmouth sits above the Teign Estuary, and on a clear day a pupil in a lesson can watch the water open into Lyme Bay, which is a lovely thing to lead…
£15,096 per term
Truro High School for Girls
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Truro High School for Girls, founded in 1880 and home to around 340 pupils aged three to eighteen, is that increasingly rare thing: a small institution that…
£14,934.00 per term (Senior School Full Boarding inc VAT)
Mutney · CC0On a hillside above Truro, its cathedral filling the middle distance, this Methodist school has spent nearly a century and a half turning Cornish children into…
£14,847.60 per term (inc. VAT)
Andrew Abbott · CC BY-SA 2.0Founded in 1584 in a small Rutland market town, Uppingham built its name not on league tables but on what it does with a child holding an instrument, a stage…
£16,810 per term
David P Howard · CC BY-SA 2.0Warwick School opens with a boast few can match: a founding date of 914, before the Norman Conquest, before England had properly settled into shape. Admire it,…
£18,773 per term
Lewis Hulbert · CC BY-SA 3.0Founded in 1853 as the Duke of Wellington's living memorial, a school for the sons of fallen officers, the college began with a fine instinct: privilege…
£21,690 per term (including VAT)
Wellington School in Somerset opened in 1837 and is not, to be clear, the grander Wellington College in Berkshire with which international families sometimes…
£16,745 per term
Westminster School
Map data © OpenStreetMap

A short walk from the Abbey where kings are crowned, and closer still to Parliament, sits a school that has fed Britain's public and intellectual life since…
£23,094 per term
Colin Smith · CC BY-SA 2.0Westonbirt occupies the Italianate mansion of Robert Holford, the Victorian plant collector who gave the world the arboretum next door, and there is something…
Contact school for current fees
Peter Trimming · CC BY-SA 2.0The peacocks come as a surprise, roaming forty-five acres in South Croydon, and there is something clarifying about a school unembarrassed to let beauty share…
£20,538 per term
Ian Alexander · CC BY-SA 4.0Winchester College has taught on the same Hampshire stones since 1382, but the family reading this is not buying a foundation myth. It is buying five years…
£20,700 per term
A statue of the Sacred Heart sits at the centre of 700 acres in the Surrey hills, and it tells you something before results are mentioned. Founded in 1842 by…
£17,250 per term (Years 9 to Upper Sixth, full boarding, excluding VAT)
Woodhouse Grove School
Map data © OpenStreetMap

Founded in 1812 to educate the sons of impecunious Methodist preachers, Woodhouse Grove still carries that grain in the wood: a grounded, unshowy Yorkshire…
£15,210 per term
On a clear day the Wrekin rises 400-odd metres over the Shropshire plain, and the school beneath it is in no hurry to be somewhere else. Founded in 1880 on the…
£15,700 per term (Full boarding UK, Year 9-13); £17,000 per term (Full boarding international, Year 9-13)
Owen Massey McKnight from Oxford, England · CC BY-SA 2.0On Banbury Road in north Oxford, a walk from the university that names the city, Wychwood has spent roughly 125 years being small, about 120 pupils from 11 to…
£15,340.00 per term
Knight of Gloucestershire · CC BY-SA 4.0Wycliffe College, spread across 52 acres of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds tip toward the Severn, makes a claim few independent schools dare: it does not…
£19,260 per term
David Hillas · CC BY-SA 2.0Founded in 1896 by Frances Dove to take girls seriously as intellects when English education would not, Wycombe Abbey remains, on its 170-acre parkland estate,…
£21,500 per term
Walk into d'Overbroeck's expecting flint and cloisters and you will be corrected quickly. This is a school of converted north Oxford houses spread across…
£9,905 per term (Sixth Form full boarding)