Downe House School

History

Downe House was founded in 1907 by Olive Willis, its first headmistress, as an all-girls' boarding school. Its first home was Down House in the village of Downe, Kent (now part of the London Borough of Bromley), which had been the home of Charles Darwin.

By 1921 Down House was too small for the school, so Willis bought The Cloisters, Cold Ash, Berkshire, from the religious order known as the Order of Silence. The school moved to the Cloisters in 1922, where it has since remained. It now accepts day pupils but is still predominantly a boarding school.

Downe House won Tatlers "Best Public School" award in 2011.

Houses

As most girls at Downe House are boarders, the house system is incorporated with the boarding programme. Three boarding houses – Hill, Hermitage, and Darwin – home the youngest students (ages 11–13). They progress to a mixed-age house – either AGN (Ancren Gate North), AGS (Ancren Gate South), Aisholt, Holcombe, or Tedworth – until the sixth form, where they board in either Willis or York house.

Students in the Lower Fourth year spend a term boarding at Downe House's campus at Sauveterre near Toulouse, France.

Admissions

Downe House educates girls between the ages of 11 and 18, taking them from the last years of junior school through to the sixth form. Girls can join the school at the ages of eleven, twelve, or thirteen, on leaving a primary or prep school, or at sixteen after completing GCSEs. The biggest intake of girls is at 11+.

Entry into Downe House is competitive, with entrants needing to pass the Common Entrance Examination.

Curriculum

The core subjects at Downe House are English, mathematics and science as well as humanities, classics and social sciences subjects and there are options such as fine arts, foreign languages and business studies.

In 2010, the Cambridge Pre-U was introduced as an alternative to A Levels at Downe House.

2004 fees story

Main article: Independent school fee fixing scandal

In 2004, as reported by The Times, Downe House was one of about sixty of the country's leading independent schools which were accused of running an unlawful price-fixing cartel, contrary to the Competition Act 1998, enabling them to drive up fees charged to thousands of parents. After an Inquiry later that year, in 2005 the school was ordered to pay a nominal penalty of £10,000, and with the other schools agreed to make ex-gratia payments totalling three million pounds into a trust to benefit pupils who attended the schools during the period in question. However, the Independent Schools Council said the investigation had been "a scandalous waste of public money". Jean Scott, its head, said that the schools had always been exempt from anti-cartel rules applied to business, were following a long-established procedure in sharing the information with each other, and had been unaware of a change to the law, on which they had not been consulted. She wrote to John Vickers, the Office of Fair Trading director-general, "They are not a group of businessmen meeting behind closed doors to fix the price of their products to the disadvantage of the consumer. They are schools that have quite openly continued to follow a long-established practice because they were unaware that the law had changed."

Notable alumnae

• Margaret Aston (1932–2014), medieval historian
• Clare Balding (b. 1971), BBC sports presenter
• Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), novelist and short story writer
• Tessa Dahl (b. 1957), writer and actor
• Amaryllis Fleming (1925–1999), cellist
• Aileen Fox (1907–2005), archaeologist
• Miranda Hart (b. 1972), comedian and actress
• Marina Hyde (b. 1974), columnist for The Guardian
• Geraldine James (b. 1950), actress
• Catherine, Princess of Wales (b. 1982)
• Mary Midgley (1919–2018), philosopher
• Rosemary Murray (1913–2004), chemist, lecturer and the first woman to hold office as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge
• Countess Alexandra Tolstoy (b. 1973), writer and presenter
• Edith Holt Whetham (1911–2001), agricultural historian and economist
• Annette Worsley-Taylor (1944–2015), fashion entrepreneur and the founder of London Fashion Week.

Notes

Bibliography

• (Describes life at Downe House during World War I)
• At openlibrary.org

References

1. "A new School uniform is in the offing". Downe House School.
2. "Schools Guide 2012 - Downe House". [[Tatler (1901).
3. [http://goodschoolsguide.co.uk/school/downe-house-school.html Profile] {{webarchive. link. (13 August 2009 on the [[Good Schools Guide]])
4. Atkins 1976, pp. 106–110.
5. (7 October 2011). "Cold Ash school named Tatler's school of 2011". [[Newbury Weekly News]].
6. "Boarding".
7. "Downe House Sauveterre".
8. "curriculum".
9. "Liberated learning, through liberated teaching".
10. [https://web.archive.org/web/20070310233300/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article588559.ece Independent schools face huge fines over cartel to fix fees - Times Online]
11. (21 December 2006). "OFT names further trustees as part of the independent schools settlement". [[Office of Fair Trading]].
12. (3 January 2004). "Private schools send papers to fee-fixing inquiry". The Daily Telegraph.
13. (14 December 2014). "Margaret Aston: Historian who illuminated the study of religious life in England between the late Middle Ages and the Civil War". The Independent.
14. Cochrane, Kira. (11 January 2013). "Clare Balding: 'I want to make the world better, for women mainly'". [[The Guardian]].
15. Bowen, Elizabeth. (1950). "Collected Impressions". Longmans Green and Co.
16. (9 April 1989). "Out of the Shadow". [[Chicago Tribune]].
17. Cook, Andrew. (2015). "The Ian Fleming Miscellany". The History Press.
18. Quinnell, Henrietta. (2009). "Fox [née Henderson], Aileen Mary, Lady Fox (1907–2005)".
19. Gilbert, Gerard. (3 December 2011). "Miranda Hart: 'I was never in the cool gang'". [[The Independent]].
20. (Summer 2011). "Not too Cool for School!". Cloisters.
21. (18 January 2019). "An interview with Marina Hyde (Dudley-Williams DH 1992)". Downe House Foundation.
22. (20 November 2022). "Downe House".
23. Roberts, Laura. (17 November 2010). "Royal wedding: 50 things you may not know about Kate Middleton and Prince William". The Daily Telegraph.
24. (12 October 2018). "Mary Midgley obituary". The Guardian.
25. (18 October 2004). "Dame Rosemary Murray, First woman to be Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University (Obituary)". The Independent.
26. May, Alex. (2009). "Murray, Dame (Alice) Rosemary (1913–2004)".
27. [https://www.burkespeerage.com/featured_families_Tolstoy.php Tolstoy family] {{Webarchive. link. (18 October 2020 at burkespeerage.com, accessed 6 January 2019)
28. Currie, Jean I.. (15 February 2001). "Edith Whetham". The Guardian.
29. Etherington-Smith, Meredith. (31 August 2015). "Annette Worsley-Taylor: London Fashion Week founder whose passion for the best design helped turn British fashion into a global success". The Independent.