Ashford School

If your child would rather stay at school until the last club finishes than come straight home, Ashford is shaped for that. It is an independent co-educational school on East Hill in Ashford, Kent, taking day pupils and boarders from eleven to eighteen, with its own prep school a few miles away at Great Chart. Most senior pupils are day pupils, but a boarding house for boys and one for girls sit on the same site, so evenings and weekends keep going around them. Entry is at eleven into Year 7, and again at Years 8, 9, 10 and sixth form.

The school opened in 1898 as a small girls' school on Queens Road, moved to Alfred House on East Hill in 1913 and has stayed there since. Alfred House is the boys' boarding house now, a neat piece of continuity in a school that has otherwise changed a good deal: it merged with Friars Prep School in 2005 and took its first boys into the senior school the year after. From 1940 to 1945 the whole school moved to Devon while the East Hill buildings housed injured soldiers, and the roll grew from 211 to 272 over those five years.

An ordinary day runs long by design. Lessons finish at 15.50, two further periods are set aside for activities until 17.30, and the library stays open after that. The Good Schools Guide calls the school 'refreshingly unpretentious' and its pupils 'curious, grounded'; one parent told it that 'high-flyers will get stretched and those who need support get it'. Pastoral care runs by year group rather than by house, with a form tutor seen twice a day. It suits a child who wants to fill the hours after lessons, and who would rather be noticed early than left to get on with it.