This year, having got more than the all-clear from Ofsted, Ampleforth is back in the top ten along with two new additions: girls’ school The Laurels and its brother school The Cedars. Based in South London’s Upper Norwood, near Croydon, on a large campus which they share with Oakwood prep school, both schools have impressed us with their uncompromising Catholic vision and increasingly high academic standards.
Boarding schools St Mary’s Ascot, Stonyhurst, Mayfield, New Hall, Downside and Worth remain in the top ten from last year, as does day school St George’s Weybridge for its commitment to its Josephite roots – unique in the UK – which teach the values of “Politesse and Douceur, Honesty and Compassion, Zeal and Happiness”.
Four of the five top prep schools remain the same, with one addition, St Philip’s in South Kensington, a small boys’ school which inspired Herald contributor Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s book Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School. While not as eccentric as it was when it was first founded in 1934 (as late as the 1960s the school had no classes in biology or chemistry because, Mr Tibbits said, “Gentlemen do not study science”), the fearless spirit of the school, which has strong connections to the Brompton Oratory, endures, turning out confident boys and sending them on to the likes of Ampleforth, Eton and Winchester.
Alongside the Catholic Good Schools Guide are four feature articles, including my interview with Peter Roberts, the new headmaster of Ampleforth. We also have Katherine Bennett’s take on a new American-style Catholic home-schooling-hybrid academy in Warrington, Gertrude Clarke on how Catholic schools must stop employing the services of charities with no Catholic ethos, and Louise Kirk on Alive to the World, a relationships education curriculum which teaches children about modesty.
We hope you enjoy the issue.
