Worth School

Worth suits a child who does better somewhere they are known by name than in a large, competitive year group, and who is likely to grow into themselves gradually rather than arrive already polished. It is an independent Catholic Benedictine school for boys and girls aged 11 to 18, taking day pupils and boarders, with around half the senior school boarding full time. It sits at Turners Hill in West Sussex, on the old Paddockhurst estate, a short drive from Gatwick and midway between London and Brighton.

Benedictine monks bought Paddockhurst in the early 1930s and opened the senior school in 1959; the monastery is still next door, and the school shares its 500 acres of Sussex countryside, farm and woodland included. The Abbey church, built in the 1960s in the round with the altar at its centre and seating for 900, is where the whole school gathers. Girls joined the sixth form in 2008 and the younger years shortly after. The choir has sung at a papal mass in Rome alongside the Sistine Chapel Choir, which tells you how seriously music is taken, and there are more than 150 weekly clubs and societies besides.

The Good Schools Guide found 'well-balanced, kind and ambitious young people, the sort who look you in the eye', and noted that pupils are allowed to 'flourish in their own time'. The head talks about children being challenged to work hard and encouraged to be kind, in a school where every young person is truly known. It suits a child who wants to belong to something settled, who likes trying many things without needing to be best at any of them, and who would rather be noticed than left alone.