The questions that reveal what a school is actually made of Every year, as the independent school open day season moves into its final weeks, I have the same conversation with parents in almost every consultation. They have visited three or four or five schools. They have collected prospectuses and attended presentations and spoken with admissions staff. They have been impressed, or uncertain, or quietly disappointed — and they are struggling to articulate why, because they went in asking the...

A divide that is already forming — and already consequential There is a phrase appearing with increasing frequency in education research published in 2025 and 2026 that every parent considering an independent school should encounter: a new and enduring disadvantage gap. This is not the language of alarmism or advocacy. It is the sober assessment of researchers who study educational inequality, and it refers specifically to the gap currently forming between pupils who are receiving structured,...

The stories that tell you more than any prospectus This term, two stories from the independent school world have circulated with the kind of genuine pride that no marketing team could manufacture. Two Year 13 pupils from Taunton School in Somerset have signed professional contracts with Bristol Bears Rugby Union Club — not as a career aspiration to be pursued after university, but as an immediate reality, taking effect as they leave school at eighteen. At Sherborne Girls School in Dorset, the...