Ewell Castle School

If your child would rather be somewhere unshowy, Ewell Castle is worth a visit. It is an independent co-educational day school for four to eighteen in Ewell village, Surrey, with just over six hundred pupils across four buildings within a few minutes' walk of each other. Worth knowing before you go: it began as a boys' school in 1926 and boys still outnumber girls by roughly two to one, so a daughter would be joining a mixed school that is still visibly boy-heavy.

The senior school is in the Castle itself, a battlemented Gothic Revival house from the 1810s with a clock tower and octagonal corner turrets, on ground that was once part of Henry VIII's hunting land at Nonsuch. The school opened on 19 January 1926 with forty boys and still keeps Founder's Day on that date. The prep school sits across the road in Glyn House, which the Good Schools Guide notes is 'separated from the senior school by a road and a church (where resides a cat, a regular visitor)'.

The day runs half past eight to four, with early care from ten to eight and after-school care at the prep until six. Phones go into locked pouches for the whole day in Years 7 to 11. Children keep the same house, each named after a castle, from prep right through, and the whole of Year 7 goes to Chessington World of Adventures in the second week of the autumn term. The Guide calls it 'a modest, friendly and inclusive school' that 'may lack the wow factor of some of its rivals but nonetheless offers something very special', and one parent described the parents as 'nice, not flashy'. It suits a child who does not want to be sized up.