Harrow School was founded in 1572 under a royal charter granted by Elizabeth I. It is one of the most famous schools in the world. Distinguished Old Harrovians include seven British Prime Ministers and the first Prime Minister of India, Pandit Nehru, as well as poets and writers as diverse as Byron, Sheridan and Richard Curtis.
The School is situated on a 400-acre site close to London. It specialises in providing a high-quality, full-boarding education for boys. Pupils benefit from a combination of academic excellence and an outstanding range of opportunities outside the classroom.
Academically, our aim at Harrow is to ensure that all pupils achieve outstanding examination results relative to their ability. We achieve this by having high expectations of pupils, and teachers are expected to teach in a way that will motivate and interest them. Many departments run their own extracurricular societies to stimulate interest, and lectures by distinguished speakers from outside the School are frequent.
All Harrow pupils go on to university, art college, drama school or medical school. Entry to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, as well as to top American universities, is achieved by one in five pupils on average.
There are eleven boarding houses. House Masters and their families live in the boarding houses, and are assisted by an Assistant House Master. The House Master keeps a watchful eye over the welfare, personal and academic, of every boy in his care; for parents, he is the main point of contact with the School. Each House has a resident Matron who is supported by the School's Medical Centre where trained nursing staff offer 24-hour care. There are no dormitories: a boy shares his room with a boy of the same age for the first three to six terms and thereafter has a room to himself. Each House has a common room, with newspapers, television and video. All have their own gardens and sports facilities.
Harrow has excellent sporting facilities and fields teams at all levels in a wide range of sports. The School aims to provide a very high standard of coaching and competition for the best sportsmen while enabling the less gifted to find something they can enjoy. Pupils can play sport every day if they wish, and for the enthusiast there are many opportunities to play and excel.
The arts are an extremely important part of Harrow's packed calendar of activities. The enthusiasm and energy of our staff are matched by the talent of our pupils, and the quality of our plays, musical performances and artistic projects matches our pupils' achievements on the sports fields and in the classroom. The Music department produces around 60 concerts a year, while the Drama department presents about 14 plays a year. Pupils have the opportunity to learn about curatorship and art exhibitions in the Old Speech Room Gallery, and to see how the professionals do it across all these disciplines through trips to London's shows, concerts and galleries.
All boys are encouraged to join the very many clubs and societies. Some are organised by academic departments or are related to games and sports; others are less easy to classify: the Debating society, the Photography Club, the Natural History Society and the Conservation group. All teachers live in the School, and this makes possible the extraordinary diversity of worthwhile activities on offer in the evenings and at weekends.
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Extract taken from Cradles of success: Britain's traditional Public Schools by Mario Di Monaco |
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