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Our view of Pinewood School
Welcoming, warm, thoughtful, busy, varied, thriving and all about the children, Pinewood is a must-see. The lack of head boy/girl encapsulates the overarching takeaway from this 84-acre nirvana which is that every child is important.
Where is Pinewood School?
Easy to find and easy to park, Pinewood is set on the top of a hill with sweeping views of the acres of grounds and the Wiltshire and Oxfordshire
countryside beyond. The majority of families come from within a 25-mile radius and parental drop-offs are supplemented by a bus service fanning out in four or five directions, including Marlborough, Chilton Foliat and Hungerford, South Cerney, Pewsey and Wantage.
Nursery and pre-prep pupils start school life in the old stable block, before moving into the beautiful main house. Original buildings are complemented by newer updates with ‘The Hoyland’ forming the eco-friendly jewel in the crown. Opened in 2021 by the now King Charles III and Queen Camilla, it boasts snazzy classrooms and the ‘Everest steps’ as well as being the base for both learning support and wellbeing. The Hoyland is perhaps a glimpse of the way things are going at Pinewood with an extensive estate decarbonisation survey already running in order to establish the exact route to net zero.
Pinewood shines outdoors too, with its magnificent grounds, super-duper treetop climbing frame, fairy garden, mountain-bike track, nature walk and a rather special newly planted ring of seven oriental plane trees, one for each decade of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign and encircling a traditional hedgerow, created specifically to provide habitats for insects and birdlife.
School headmaster
Neal Bailey and his wife Nici, in post since September 2020, are a couple whose influence on Pinewood Prep School is greater than the sum of their parts - their skill sets are complementary and wide-ranging, but their values are utterly united. Genuine, amiable and kind, they set the perfect example for their young charges and with their own children here too, they know first-hand the importance of the Pinewood parent and pupil partnership.
Pinewood has long championed kindness as the ultimate legacy. ‘Kindness doesn’t have a price,’ says the head. ‘It’s the be-all and end-all.’ He is well aware that academic results are important but ‘our priority starts somewhere else and leads to academic excellence – we just put it in a different order’. An ethos that pervades the playing fields here too, with the head of sport described by the head as ‘the most morally exemplary person I have ever met’ – participation and equal opportunity are the starting points and sporting success follows on as a direct result of putting wellbeing before winning.
Neal and Nici both know that continued success here at Pinewood has much to do with getting the right people and ‘if we fill the school with like-minded people, that’s very powerful and with a strong team, you can take the school to places you couldn’t before’, so protecting, training and retaining their key staff is vital – and ‘it’s a great place to work’ Mr Bailey adds with a smile.
He wants the very best for every pupil (whatever that looks like for them), an ethos which fuels his ambition to be ‘a touch more aspirational’ across the board. ‘If you don’t ask the question, the answer is always no,’ he adds wisely and so there is always room to push for a little more. But Neal and Nici Bailey get it - they are professionals and parents, they want pupils to be valued, challenged and kind but they also want them to be children, ‘If a prep school can’t be fun, then what is it? We should all be silly sometimes.’
Pinewood School admissions process
Unsurprisingly, Pinewood is a popular place and despite the testing economic climate, the school has benefited from the exodus from London and a post-Covid appreciation of what children really need. September 2023 marks the highest pupil numbers for nearly a decade but even so, they will always do their best to accommodate children wishing to join – but register early if you can.
Pinewood is a proudly non-selective school, so there are no formal assessments although pupils coming into Years 3 to 8 will be gently assessed to help inform setting decisions and ensure the right level of support from the outset. It’s a first-come, first-served operation, although they do try hard to keep a pretty even boy-girl ratio. Pre-prep pupils come in for taster sessions following an offer, whereas children joining higher up the school are invited to a taster day first to give them an opportunity to get stuck into everything from classroom lessons to sport and extracurricular activities. If your child has a curiosity about the world and a have-a-go approach to life, they will fit right in.
Academics and destinations
Pinewood has always been known as a properly holistic school, but it also achieves on the academic front. A whopping 22 scholarships were awarded this year across all disciplines (academic, sport, art, drama, and music).
The prep school is divided into lower (Years 3 and 4), middle (Years 5 and 6) and upper (Years 7 and 8) schools. Lesson times were recently increased from 35 to 45 minutes to slow down the pace of the school day and to give children more time to engage with each subject, as well as factor in five minutes for a brisk walk between classes where necessary. Prep can be done at home or in school. Pupils are taught both by class teachers and specialist teachers in science, ICT, French, Latin, music and art. Setting begins with maths in the lower school, and builds on additional subjects higher up.
As a non-selective school, it is fully understood that some children will struggle with certain subjects and there’s a brilliant learning-skills department for those youngsters who need a bit of extra help. There’s a refreshingly inclusive attitude to setting too, which now operates as a more fluid banding system to move away from the idea of a ‘bottom set’ which can feel very demotivating. The scholarship set will remain in place to challenge the most able, but the curriculum for all pupils has also evolved to reflect the changing life of a prep school child (who now has to ‘peak at least twice’, according to the head – both in the Year 6 pre-test and then again as they exit at Year 8). It’s a case of discreetly preparing pupils to give the best account of themselves at 11+ and then continuing to motivate these young minds by making learning as relevant and interesting as possible.
As pupils reach the top years of the school, the emphasis is firmly on finding the right senior school for the child rather than meeting parental aspirations. Pupils go on to a wide range of schools, with most choosing co-eds: roughly half head for Cheltenham College or Marlborough, and last year’s leavers went to 23 different senior schools - a fitting statistic for a school that champions individuality.
Co-curricular at Pinewood School
Expect plenty of sport. Top of the agenda is hockey, netball, cricket, rugby and football, all of which come with a ‘have a go’ headline with Pinewood regularly fielding A to D teams. There’s a brand new Astro and the old one has been resurfaced to match, adding a whopping 12 tennis courts to the summer offering. There are grass pitches galore, an athletics track for the summer, a nine-hole golf course and a recently-refurbished outdoor swimming pool (with long-term plans for a cover to prolong the period of use). Fixtures against other schools take place on Wednesday afternoons and every other Saturday, and fiercely contested house matches are held once a term.
Drama, music and art are all thriving and are part of the curriculum almost throughout. Annual musical highlights include the bumper summer concert and the hugely successful rock show (this lot sure know how to raise the roof), and there are a number of more informal opportunities for soloists to perform throughout each term. Drama productions here are some of the most professional looking on the prep-school circuit and are always played to an absolutely packed house.
Outdoor activity and extracurricular high jinks have always been an important part of life at Pinewood with Thursday afternoons set aside for the activities programme. But in September 2023, pupils started hopping onto the action-packed
Pinewood Life Skills programme – the brainchild of new deputy head Tim Knapp. The initiative has replaced two prep sessions each week, not at all at the expense of academic rigour – quite the contrary, the programme aims to equip children with social skills, empathy and collaboration, enhancing their ability to learn across the board and setting them up well for life beyond the classroom. The programme encompasses service and society, knowledge and curiosity, imagination and creativity, leisure and activity, life skills and acquisition and surroundings and adventure – or perhaps more succinctly... it is monumentally fun.
Boarding at Pinewood School
Although home isn’t far away, Pinewood pupils love their
boarding. It’s on offer for Years 5 to 8, and 65 per cent stay at school on either a weekly or regular basis (‘weekly’ here means Monday to Friday or Saturday, depending on the weekend; ‘regular’ means committing to set nights each week). There are no full boarders; everyone goes home on Saturday nights, so this isn’t a school for the international crowd.
Dedicated house parents run this very ‘extended family’ style boarding house, (duties involve making pancakes for seventy-five children on Shrove Tuesday) and generally making it into something that most kids want in on. Dorms are smartly decorated and picturesquely named after places near the school’s Devon roots: Happy Valley, Cherrybrook and Dartfordleigh.
There is an exeat every other weekend and on ‘in’ weekends, children play matches in the morning and then head home in time for lunch.
Pinewood School community
Wellbeing is not just part of life at Pinewood Prep, Wiltshire, it is the central core. Head of wellbeing Hayley Davies created the role some five or six years ago after appreciating both her affinity for it and the increasing need for a dedicated lead in this field. She knows children and she knows Pinewood (having come here as an NQT more than 20 years ago) and already, the role has grown to encompass timetabled sessions, drop-ins, training of staff (including four
ELSAs which are unusual outside the state sector) guiding wellbeing pupil ambassadors and the addition of several members of full-time staff as well as visiting specialists. Mrs Davies runs a ‘five ways to wellbeing’ strategy and all children in the prep school are surveyed twice a year, including specific questions about sport or food to really hone in on areas that are promoting high levels of contentment and those which may need further investigation. Pre-preppers are surveyed annually as the process, usually done one-to-one and picture-based, takes longer.
Parents and teachers are equally welcome in the wellbeing area, and this really is a school, as the head notes, that ‘looks after families and not just children’. They are a tight bunch here, a feeling of unity and loyalty that can’t help but rub off on you.
And finally...
Our pupil guides were genuinely delightful company and the school as a whole seemed burstingly proud to show us anything and everything that they do. Neal and Nici Bailey most certainly lead by example, enveloping the school in an inclusive warmth which yields the very best from every pupil by making them feel valued.