Downe House School is a selective independent girls' day and boarding school in Cold Ash, a village near Newbury, Berkshire, for girls aged 11–18. The Good Schools Guide described Downe House as an "Archetypal traditional girls' full boarding school turning out delightful, principled, courteous and able girls who go on to make a significant contribution to the world".
History
Downe House was founded in 1907 by Olive Willis, its first headmistress, as an all-girls' boarding school. Its first home was Down House in the village of Downe, Kent, which had been the home of Charles Darwin. By 1921 Down House was too small for the school, so Willis bought The Cloisters, Cold Ash, Berkshire, to which the school moved in 1922, and where it remains. It now accepts day pupils but is still predominantly a boarding school. Downe House won Tatlers "Best Public School" award in 2011.
Houses
As most girls at Downe House are boarders, the house system is incorporated with the boarding programme. Every girl belongs to a mixed age house throughout their time at the school. Students, however, only live in the mixed age houses from U4–U5. The houses are:
Hill
Hermitage
Darwin
AGN
AGS
Aisholt
Holcombe
Tedworth
Willis
York
Admissions
Downe House educates girls between the ages of eleven and eighteen, taking them from the last years of junior school through to the sixth form. Girls can join the school at the ages of eleven, twelve, or thirteen, on leaving a primary or prep school, or at sixteen after completing GCSEs. The biggest intake of girls is at 11+. Entry into Downe House is competitive, with entrants needing to pass the Common Entrance Examination.
Curriculum
The core subjects at Downe House are English, Mathematics and Science as well as Humanities, Classics and Social Sciences subjects and there are options such as Fine Arts, Foreign Languages and Business Studies. In 2010, the Cambridge Pre-U was introduced as an alternative to A Levels at Downe House.
Houses
For the first two years, pupils are split between three lower school boarding houses: Hill, Hermitage and Darwin. They then move on to their mixed aged houses in their third year, the houses being AGS, AGN, Aisholt, Tedworth and Holcombe. The final two years of sixth form are spent in either Willis or York house, as the houses alternate between year groups. The five mixed age houses are used for inter-house competitions such as House Drama, House Music, House Dance and Sports Day.
2004 fees story
In 2004, as reported by The Times, Downe House was one of about sixty of the country's leading independent schools which were accused of running an unlawful price-fixing cartel, contrary to the Competition Act 1998, enabling them to drive up fees charged to thousands of parents. After an Inquiry later that year, in 2005 the school was ordered to pay a nominal penalty of £10,000, and with the other schools agreed to make ex-gratia payments totalling three million pounds into a trust to benefit pupils who attended the schools during the period in question. However, the Independent Schools Council said the investigation had been "a scandalous waste of public money". Jean Scott, its head, said that the schools had always been exempt from anti-cartel rules applied to business, were following a long-established procedure in sharing the information with each other, and had been unaware of a change to the law, on which they had not been consulted. She wrote to John Vickers, the Office of Fair Trading director-general, "They are not a group of businessmen meeting behind closed doors to fix the price of their products to the disadvantage of the consumer. They are schools that have quite openly continued to follow a long-established practice because they were unaware that the law had changed."
