Sandroyd School is an independent co-educational preparatory school for day and boarding pupils aged 2 to 13 in the south of Wiltshire, England. The school's main building is Rushmore House, a 19th-century country house which is surrounded by the Rushmore Estate, now playing fields, woods and parkland. Sandroyd School was originally established by the ReverendLouis Herbert Wellesley Wesley as a small private coaching establishment for boys hoping to enter Eton College. In the latest Independent Schools Inspectorate report carried out in 2014, Sandroyd School was judged as 'excellent' in all nine inspected categories.
Location
The school is in the south of Berwick St John parish, near the village of Tollard Royal and the county border with Dorset.
History
Sandroyd School was founded in 1888 by the Revd. L. H. Wellesley Wesley as a school for boys, at his home, Sandroyd House in Cobham, Surrey. He was a great-grandson of Charles Wesley. From 1898 the school was governed by two men, until then assistant masters at Elstree School: Charles Plumpton Wilson and William Meysey Hornby, who took over from Wesley that year, as Headmaster and Deputy Headmaster respectively. Wilson retired in 1920 and Hornby took his place, until his own retirement in 1931. In 1939, the school signed a lease on Rushmore House and the surrounding Rushmore Park, lying in the centre of Cranborne Chase on the borders of Wiltshire and Dorset. In 1939, with the threat of the Second World War, the school moved there, where it has remained ever since. Rushmore House is an early 19th-century country house, remodelled and extended around 1880 for Augustus Pitt Rivers, army officer and pioneer of modern archaeology, who also created the Larmer Tree Gardens nearby. The estate was sold in 1963 by his grandson, George Pitt-Rivers. A link between the school's two sites is that Sandroyd House was built in 1860 for the pre-Raphaelite painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope by the architect Philip Webb, the friend of William Morris, and it was Webb who remodelled the interior of Rushmore for Pitt Rivers twenty years later. He also designed an arched gateway for the park, the drawings for which are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1995 the school started to accept some day pupils, and in 2004 it became coeducational.
Nursery and pre-prep school
Sandroyd School has a pre-prep and nursery school known as the Walled Garden, opened in 2004, for children aged two to seven. This was described as 'excellent' in an ISI inspection report of 2014.
''The Sandroydian''
The Sandroydian school magazine is published three times a year. The magazine contains an editorial by the Headmaster, reports by staff and pupils of the many activities, outings and special events which have taken place in the course of the term, and full sports results. In addition there is a section reserved for some of the pupils' creative work in art, stories and poetry.
Admissions
Before entry to Sandroyd, all prospective pupils are invited to an assessment morning or afternoon in the year before they are due to start at the school.
