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Oundle School

School rating 4 / 5 by

Great Hall Peterborough Northamptonshire PE8 4GH United Kingdom
Boarding
4th to 12th
Day
4th to 12th
Gender
Coed

Academic

Oundle School review by .

During my time there, Oundle managed to pull off one of the hardest tricks in education today, simultaneously gaining a reputation as an academically successful school without ever coming across as overly intense or aggressive. The quality of the teaching was always extremely good and occasionally utterly superb, with the history department inevitably being singled out for praise by everybody that was a part of it. No less exemplary are the various science departments, based in the SciTec building, churning out year after year of students full to the brim with both accomplished and enthusiastic scientists. What made the real difference though was the fact that teachers were actively encouraged to help their charges outside of class time if that was what the student wanted (and occasionally even if that wasn't what the student wanted!). The number of times that I went and found the teacher on duty in my boarding house at gone 10pm to go through a Latin translation or check my working on a Chemistry question defy belief, and I hold that it was down to this extra effort that I made my required A level grades. This was no formal school program as far as I'm aware, rather it stemmed from the deep-seated philosophy within the school that education wasn't something that just switched off at the end of the official school day. Education was something that was there for anyone who wanted it to grab it at any time of day or night. It was as a result of this philosophy that Oundle was extraordinarily good at bringing the less academically successful students up to a good standard - indeed, one could almost say that they focused on this aim at the slight expense of the more academically adept. But then that is the way it should be - the talented and determined taught themselves if needed (which was rare), it's the others who require the help.

College Counseling

Oundle invested the most extraordinary amount of effort into their Oxbridge programme, and at the....

Sample insights on college counseling

  • They have contacts at most of the major universities and feel perfectly comfortable picking up the phone and advocating for a student to get accepted somewhere they feel is a good fit for that student. However, these counselors are certainly not magic bullets. They cannot guarantee that a student will get into an Ivy League university...
  • For those wishing to move on to Oxford or Cambridge, the provision is second-to-none. In the months running up to application and interview, every subject faculty offers classes (often run by former Oxbridge tutors) exploring further areas of their subject as well as offering advice on personal statements, interview technique and more...

Admissions - Getting Accepted

Upper School entrants tended to be mroe academically successful than their counterparts who had joined....

Sample insights on admissions

  • For the interview, dress conservatively. Try to be very clean and put together. Also, I was a tour guide for two years and at the end of every tour, we were asked to evaluate the candidate so if you think the tour is not apart of the process, you are very wrong. Ask questions and be interested. Also, tip for the parents: the kids speak on the tour. Do not ask their questions for them...
  • Most younger siblings have an easy time in the admissions process. I can only think of one case of a younger sibling not being admitted. About half of the students who entered with me had come from public schools. The remainder came from private K-6 schools, or had transferred from other New York private schools The Elizabeth Morrow School and St. Bernard were two of the larger feeder schools...

School Life

Inevitably, the student life in a boarding school was utterly fantastic. The best years of my life - there's nothing like a boarding environment to knock the edges off a few more difficult kids and allow everybody to shine. Bullying was non-existant - I can only remember one incident which was quickly and efficiently dealt with by the school within the next few days. Discipline was strong, but then it has to be in a mixed boarding school, and if you didn't stray out of line then it didn't affect you. Suffice to say that there were no rules that....

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