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Our View
Breadth, adventure, outdoors, experiences and gusto – that’s King’s Hawford in a nutshell. One of two King’s Worcester Foundation preps, the school offers a distinctive experience, fostering a passion for outdoor education in a calm, unhurried environment that nurtures childhood exploration. In kindergarten (from age two) and reception, every child gets a weekly forest-school session in woodland with space to plant trees, build shelters and learn about wildlife. These outdoor activities give boys and girls the self-confidence and independence of mind that supports achievement in the mainstream curriculum. There’s a quietly dynamic evolution going on here, and we love it.
Where?
You’ll find this little rural haven just outside Worcester on the ring road, accessible but with a spacious, 23-acre vibe. Any problems negotiating the local traffic are ameliorated by a flexible hour-long drop-off window in the mornings, and the school operates a bus service between King’s Hawford and King’s Worcester at both ends of the day.
Head
Tom Butt is the perfect fit for King’s Hawford. He’s positive, personable, witty but no-nonsense, and with ‘consistency’ as his superpower. Several years into his tenure he is still every bit as passionate about King’s Hawford’s staged evolution, which he rigorously advances through the lens of ‘is this right for the children?’.
‘It’s not a school that needs a revolution,’ he says. ‘It’s a massive privilege to come to a school where staff care so deeply about the place and about the children.’ Part of his role is to ensure that pupils are ‘King’s ready’ by the time they leave, but it’s the process that matters. ‘You only get one shot at a magical childhood,’ says Mr Butt, and it’s the little things that adults might see as superficial (like the chickens, the beehives and the outdoor pizza oven) that children will remember for the rest of their lives. There is an ethos of allowing pupils to make mistakes and encouraging even the youngest to learn something from them.
‘We are big enough for everyone to be able to do everything but small enough to really know every pupil and every family’, says Mr Butt. It’s clear that the head is keenly aware of this sense of equilibrium across the board, for example, understanding exactly how to balance opportunities so that there’s enough to go around but not so much that it isn’t valued. ‘We don’t mind encouraging a gentle sense of FOMO’, he says - the sort that positively prompts pupils to get involved with something new or different because it looks like fun.
He's a staunch advocate of rewarding personal bests, ‘It’s not an exercise in comparison’, he says, it’s a competition with yourself. ‘Can I be better today than I was yesterday and can I be better tomorrow than I was today? We’re not in the business of standing still,’ he adds, passionate about filling each and every day with memories, experiences and opportunities which he believes to be at the very core of a preparatory education. Creating a wildlife pond, installing beehives, building a hillfort, it all inspires curiosity and the ‘have a go’ spirit that he wants to nurture. ‘It’s not my school, it’s theirs,’ he concludes with a smile.
Admissions
King’s Hawford isn’t overly selective, partly because it takes children from such a young age, but also in the sense that it’s not just looking for academic ability. There is an informal maths and reading assessment as part of the process for Year 1 onwards, as well as a discussion with the head as to whether the school could provide for the child’s needs and whether they would be a good fit and flourish here. Scholarships are available with varying levels of fee remission.
Academics and senior school destinations
Light, bright and spacious, classrooms are adorned with topic displays or ‘proud boards’ highlighting pupils’ work. The school broadly follows the national curriculum and uses White Rose maths (which is highly respected as a means of building reasoning skills). There are two forms in most year groups from reception, and class sizes rarely extend beyond 15. Forest school is baked into life here right up until Year 3, and there are outdoor explorers’ clubs for the older children, as well as a multitude of opportunities to get outside and learn from nature.
Regular adjustments and improvements are as a result of the creativity of the teachers, says Mr Butt. ‘I’m surrounded by really great people who just make things happen – if staff are excited about teaching something, that inevitably rubs off on the children’.
Specialist teaching begins in pre-prep and builds year on year, but it’s the language provision that caught the eye of our researchers. German is taught from kindergarten (mainly as it’s thought to be the most akin to English and therefore easier for young learners), French is added in Year 4 and Spanish joins the multicultural cocktail in Year 6. There’s also a Latin club (and in the past there has been both a Russian club and a Mandarin club) for pupils wanting yet more linguistic opportunities.
For any children needing a little extra support, there is the wonderfully titled Learning Success HQ in the main building, comprising two very appealing classrooms complete with a pictorial guide to basic sign language, which is learnt by all to help make school life more inclusive for hearing-impaired pupils.
Library enthusiasts can hop onto a real-life double-decker bus with driver’s cabin, original seats and stop bell, and kitted out with seating and shelving areas on the top and lower decks and nearly 500 books. Allegedly opened by the actual Gruffalo five years ago, the bus plays host to ‘mystery reader’ challenges and hours of contented browsing - and the ground floor is now open at break time for pupils seeking out a quieter space.
The school’s digital approach is best described as ‘limited and measured’. Tech is only used where it enhances learning, but the head remains utterly realistic. ‘We can’t expect children to realise on their own that screen time isn’t good’.
In short, the curriculum gives ‘the best possible chance to get anywhere’, says Mr Butt, although the vast majority of leavers (sometimes even 95 per cent) proceed straight to King’s Worcester, or ‘Big King’s’, as our charming pupil guides called it. Importantly, there is no longer an entry exam to King’s Worcester, a decision which speaks to the all-through nature of the school and an end to exam stress or the need to teach specifically for it. Preparation for the ‘soft landing‘ at King’s was already good, but Mr Butt (with his professional knowledge of the requirements of the senior sector) has taken it to another level, involving children in termly chapel services in Worcester Cathedral from Year 3 and shipping in King’s sixth-formers to routinely help with music, sports coaching and clubs. It's a clever combination of retaining the delightful idiosyncrasies of King’s Hawford as a childhood nirvana while simultaneously ensuring that pupils realise that they are part of something bigger and are confidently King’s ready by the time they fly the nest.
Co-curricular
King’s Hawford isn’t best known for any one facet and therein lies its charm. Pupils learn to have a go, and this ‘relentless positivity’ (as Mr Butt calls it) is echoed in the children’s embracing of dance classes in the syllabus up until Year 3, Year 6 boys confidently auditioning for choir solos in front of all their peers, and music groups and ensembles that are happy to encourage musicians at every level. And ‘Big King’s’ sees it too – it can pick out Hawford pupils from their ‘can do’ nature and a confidence derived from a prep environment in which it’s cool to be you.
Art offers a combination of mediums, while D&T aims to blend the topics being taught across other subjects. Dance takes place in the fabulous mirrored (and professional-standard) Cobb studio and is a part of the curriculum that pupils really enjoy, according to our guides. Creative-arts fans will also like the drama programme consisting of scheduled lessons, optional LAMDA classes and regular productions staged in The Barn – an enormous hall with retractable tiered seating.
About 85 per cent of pupils at King’s Hawford play an instrument, and the school is visited by 10 peripatetic music teachers. Almost 80 children belong to a choir, and performance spaces don’t come much grander than Worcester Cathedral, which is the stunning backdrop for the school’s Christmas carol concert and fundraising concerts for St Richard’s Hospice. This is a ‘singing school’, our pupil guides proudly told us - and with no hymn books in sight during assembly, pupils follow words on a screen, singing with heads up high and unmistakable gusto.
Being outdoors is de rigueur at Kings Hawford, and sport is all part and parcel of that, with more than four hours of timetabled sport every week from Year 3 onwards and some children notching up more like 10, once co-curricular clubs are thrown in too. It’s all about participation rather than performance, but with good coaching and supportive parents, there are plenty of wins as well. The long-term objective is that pupils will still be playing competitive sport at 18 because Hawford has instilled a love of it. ‘I’m not going to apologise for competitive sport – you’ve got to be able to give children the opportunities to pick up these valuable attributes such as resilience, ambition and kindness. There’s a right way to win and to lose and you have to learn that at prep school’, says Mr Butt.
On top of everything else, there’s a plethora of clubs and activities including a spot of paddling on the adjacent canal in the school’s six-seater KataKanus. There are two grass-pitch areas and a covered swimming pool that hosts weekly or fortnightly lessons for all year groups. No Astro, but pupils make use of the pitch at the nearby Droitwich Leisure Centre instead.
School community
Mr Butt commented that the ‘parent body is very present’. It’s a superb support network for the school, turning out in droves for sports or dramatic performances, devising initiatives to support local charities and raising funds for items on the school’s wish list (the fantastic fort being one such example). The parents’ association also works hard to raise additional funds, recently hosting a maxed-out capacity fireworks event. Now, we’re told they’re working on a top secret ‘transport-related’ project that we are itching to know more about.
Within the school, pupils belong to house groups – Kinver, Malvern, Client and Bredon (named after local hills) – for which they collect points and take part in challenges. Our favourite is the hotly anticipated and closely fought annual Apache Relay, involving a circuit of 36 events around the school. Intrinsic to the school’s own microcosm is the volume of pupil voice, significantly pumped up by the recent creation of the Pupil Parliament, encompassing three strands of non-academic school, life (eco, wellbeing and co-curricular) and represented by nearly 50 children from throughout the school, more than double those previously involved.
And finally....
The head is passionate about making sure that pupils feel they belong. Pastoral care ‘isn’t a thing in itself’, but rather an intrinsic part of everything they do and every decision that they make. This infectiously chirpy school is utterly charming, combining academic and character development with a 23-acre footprint of good old-fashioned fun. Where else would you have a bell whose main purpose is to call youngsters in from hide and seek?
If Curious, Caring and Confident are the new gold-plated values of the King’s Foundation, King’s Hawford are the alchemists - turning little people into confident, compassionate and curious young individuals.