Benenden School

If your daughter would relish boarding life rather than simply tolerate it, Benenden is worth a look. It is an independent girls' school in the Kent countryside outside Cranbrook, taking girls from eleven to eighteen, and almost all of them board. Most stay in on a Saturday night, which changes the feel of the place. Evenings and weekends belong to the school rather than sitting outside it. The approach is part of the first impression, a long drive through parkland and woodland, past a lake, up to a Victorian house on a rise.

It began in 1923, when three teachers left Wycombe Abbey with the plain aim of making a happy school, moving into Hemsted Park the year after. A good deal of what they started has simply carried on. There is still a school song written in 1928, and a Hobbies Display that has run since 1925, where girls set out whatever they have been making or collecting in their own time. Princess Anne arrived in the 1960s and came back in the school's centenary year to talk to pupils. None of it is worn heavily.

What parents talk about most is the looking-after. One mother told the Good Schools Guide, 'The matrons are there for your daughter in the middle of the night.' There are ten boarding houses, each with its own house staff and matrons, and a medical centre staffed through the night in term time. Sport, music, drama and art run alongside all of it. It suits a girl who wants her school to be her life for a while, and who, as the Guide puts it, sees the glass as half full.