Claremont Fan Court School

If your child is nervous about going somewhere large, Claremont Fan Court is worth walking round, because the size arrives with a great deal of space around it. It is an independent co-educational day school in Esher, Surrey, taking children from two and a half to eighteen, with around 1,200 across the whole school. Year 7 is the main senior entry, with about seventy children joining. The 11+ is two papers set by GL Assessment, a piece of creative writing and an interview in the autumn term.

The school sits in a hundred acres of parkland with a Grade I mansion at the centre of it, built for Clive of India in the 1770s in grounds laid out by Capability Brown. The National Trust's Claremont Landscape Garden, with the lake and the amphitheatre, is next door and separate. Princess Charlotte, heir to the throne, lived in the house and died there in 1817, and the young Victoria visited her uncle here. There is also a three-hundred-year-old tower in the grounds whose windows are bricks painted to look like glass. One pupil told the Good Schools Guide, 'When it snows it looks like Narnia.'

Every senior pupil joins one of six houses named after the places the school has lived since it started in 1922, and goes into a tutor group that mixes the year groups, keeping the same tutor from Year 7 to Year 11. Lessons start at 8:25 and end at four, with prep club until six, and clubs are timetabled into the lunch hour so children on the buses are not left out. Founded by Christian Science families, the school is now non-denominational and takes pupils of all faiths and none. It suits a child who will use the space.