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Thank you for visiting the site of Bromsgrove. You are now reading the web pages of one of the finest academic, sporting and artistic independent schools in the United Kingdom.
Awash with flair without drowning in pretentiousness, five hundred year old Bromsgrove School has its feet firmly in the twenty first century. We stand in the vanguard of UK and international education. Without fuss or gloss, this website serves to explain our ethos. I hope you find it both enjoyable and informative.
So many schools sound like the Garden of Eden on their websites and in their prospectuses. Smiling girls look as if they have walked out of shampoo commercials or modelling assignments; laughing boys gaze cherubically to camera as if they have never been real boys in their lives. You could swap the texts and taglines of one of these schools for another and you probably wouldn’t even notice. Everybody, it seems, is educating “the whole child”, and nothing but nothing ever seems to go wrong in these mawkish idylls. Well here I write as a Headmaster; not a marketing consultant.
In a nutshell: we are a late medieval foundation delivering first division A level performance, outstanding sporting success, a thriving and original arts scene and an extra curricular programme of staggering breadth to thirteen hundred day and boarding pupils aged between 2 and 18. And we achieve this with pizzazz. Pupils are involved and encouraged – not browbeaten into submission for the sake of tables and statistics: despite our results at A level and Oxbridge, there is no hothousing. We are inspired, not overwhelmed, by a noble history: the pompous, the staid and the formulaic are anathema to us. Warmth and compassion are bywords.
Brilliant teachers are more important than fancy websites; parents better commentators than a glossy prospectus; pupils’ achievements in adult life more accurate reflections on a School than any words of mine that follow here. We have no unique selling point: we are a school not a soundbite. And a great school is a complex, wonderful, sometimes paradoxical entity, as the following very selective set of contrasts suggests:
- £20 million pounds has been spent on Bromsgrove in the last ten years, yet we are as discreet a one hundred acre site as ever we were.
- Unashamedly academic, with remarkable A level and Oxford and Cambridge results, we are actually far less selective than many schools way below us in those league tables.
- We are a mediaeval foundation, however Bromsgrove International School Thailand (for over one thousand Prep and Senior pupils) opened in summer 2005, adding a new chapter to an ancient tale.
- Eleven hundred of the thirteen hundred pupils in the Bromsgrove system are British but we have boarding pupils from 27 countries.
- Though we are unquestionably a premier sporting school, depth and breadth – not paranoid specialisation – are the reasons why we are so popular with many children.
- And we understand that a liberal education encouraging free thinking young adults requires from the outset discipline, courtesy and consideration for others.
Bromsgrove slowly removes the comfort blankets of childhood and aspires to send young adults into the world as happy, creative, moral citizens who live motivated, fulfilled lives while enriching the lives of others.
Should you choose to visit, you will be warmly welcomed and, I hope, captivated.
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