Welcome to a truly special prep school, centred around a quest for excellence in all its forms…

An incredibly warm welcome to The Pilgrims’ School. If our website is your first contact with our community, I do hope it will encourage you to come and experience it in person very soon. 

If you are looking for the very best education for your son, we think you may have just found it. This is a bold claim, and one I stand by. I was at Pilgrims’ as a boy and I later returned as a member of staff, so I can personally attest to the role a Pilgrims’ education fulfils in providing the most wonderful foundations for life. It is our duty to ensure that this education always looks to the possibilities of the future, inspired by the best of the past.   

At Pilgrims’ we consider each child to be a part of the same extended family. We offer exceptional opportunities on our quest for excellence. Yet what are those without fun, warmth, loving care and good humour? We bring those too within our outstanding pastoral care. Thanks to my own story, and as with my own three children, I feel deeply and personally invested in seeing the boys able to develop their abilities, to understand more of themselves and others, and to realise their potential.

It is our duty to ensure that this education always looks to the possibilities of the future, inspired by the best of the past.  

We learn, play and indeed many of us live in a remarkable part of a beautiful city. It is a locality worth moving for, although, with a thriving boarding community forming the heart of the school, that is not necessarily required! Our immediate surroundings instil a very special sense of place and of rootedness that benefits the boys hugely. It is one reason that many members of our special community find themselves returning time and again through their lives. Being a double choir school with music running through the fabric, they are often greeted by the familiar sounds of choirs rehearsing and instruments being practised.

Pilgrimages, however, take pilgrims away from what and where they know, across boundaries and even through cultures around the globe. And the destination may be the goal to be reached, but the purpose is to be transformed and inspired by the experience; an experience that lies largely in the journey, travelled in community with others. It is our aim that a Pilgrims’ education provides such a transformational journey.

There is much information to explore here which details the journey, with our expert staff acting variously as pathfinders, guides and shepherds along its route. Through this website, you will discover something of our extensive curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular opportunities which inspire our boys in their quest for excellence in all its forms. Amidst it all, we emphasise that in travelling this journey in community with others the boys must develop an understanding of the relational. Any worthwhile journey will have its ups and downs, its good days and its challenging days. So it is that we aim to instil in the boys the skills that will help them through: compassion, empathy, awareness, self-awareness, consideration, and the appreciation of differences and others’ perspectives.

At the end of their pilgrimage, our boys’ destinations range across a variety of outstanding independent senior schools and we support and work alongside parents to help them choose the right destination for their son. Our academic record is very strong, and we are incredibly proud of our boys’ outstanding record of success to these schools, but are equally proud of the bonds they form with one another, with staff and with this very special school family at large. 

Please do come and visit us in person: we would be delighted to show you around.

Questions for our Headmaster

Four of our boys had the opportunity to ask Mr Butcher some important questions, from how he feels about coming back as the Headmaster, having previously been a teacher and pupil, to who his favourite superhero is.