WHAT? WHERE?

Ranby House is co-ed school tucked away in the rural countryside of North Nottinghamshire, but within easy reach of the market towns of Worksop, Newark and Ollerton. It’s the prep school and pre-prep provision to its highly regarded sister, Worksop College, a few miles away.

As first impressions go, Ranby is pretty special. The minute you turn off the main road, you step into full Enid Blyton territory – a Grade II listed former country house surrounded by 60 acres of fields and woodland.

This late 18th century house is the beating heart of Ranby, and generations of families have been through its doors since 1948. In recent history, plans to move Ranby to the main Worksop College site was met with stiff resistance from parents and former pupils who expressed their affections for the family environment and historic charm. So the decision was made to invest in the current site instead, much to the delight of all involved with Ranby.

That investment has seen a new nursery and library, new classroom areas and play spaces, bespoke learning areas in a larger Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Centre, an outdoor education centre and wildlife fishing pond, and a refurbished school chapel. Currently, the EYFS provision is in a bright and airy prefab classroom but plans are in place for a new building in the coming years.

The main building now houses the boarding facilities, lunch hall and staff offices and a gorgeous wood-lined reception which gives guests the full stately home roaring fire treatment.

As a Church of England school, kids have a service with the on site chaplain every Tuesday and Thursday morning – but all faiths are welcomed. The school takes kids from age 2 to 11 – the kindergarten, reception and Years one and two make up the pre-prep, and ages 7-11 make up the prep school. Kids are a mix of those from the local area and three Ukrainian families were welcomed into the school community last year.

It’s clear that Ranby leans into its small school ethos – it isn’t actively looking to grow past the current 229 pupil numbers – and it’s this, combined with Christian morals and the peaceful and homely setting, that creates a strong sense of family and community.

FACILITIES

Although Ranby House has loads of its own facilities including an adventure playground, specialist pre-prep outdoor equipment, fishing lake, woodland classroom, wildlife garden, theatre, sports hall, and a well-equipped IT suite; it benefits from close ties with its senior school site, and kids will regularly use its amenities including floodlit astroturf pitches, indoor swimming pool and specialist technology and science labs. Staff are also shared between the two sites, both of which help with continuity from one to the next.

SPORTS

For budding sportsters, Ranby has all of your standard offering plus a climbing wall, cricket pavilion, and outdoor tennis and netball courts. Interestingly though, they’re a prep school that’s pushing forward non-gendered sport, and are very keen to ensure this is celebrated by students and parents.

Specialist staff from the senior school regularly coach the students and during the summer, there are regular fixtures across cricket, rugby and tennis from year 3. Students pick two sports they’d like to focus on per term, and if they enjoy it, they can join teams for local matches (and 100 per cent of students from year 3-6 are in a sports team).

CREATIVE ARTS

Creative kids will thrive at Ranby. Currently, there are over 200 music lessons happening across the board every week – 84 per cent of students from Years 1-6 are currently taking music lessons, which is huge given the relative size of the school. The Performing Arts Centre plays host to school productions so there’s plenty of opportunity to show off what they’ve learnt from their music lessons.

Littlies at nursery age get access to mini piano and string lessons, while bigger kids can get tuition in piano, string, woodwind and percussion – also included are more specialist instruments like the harp.

For mini actors and actresses, there’s a 300-seat, fully equipped theatre and LAMDA Speech and Drama Tuition, and examinations are available should you want to pursue a career route early on. As you’d expect, there’s a full programme of performances for little ones.

SCHOOL

The layout of the site itself is a mixture of different buildings from the main manor house and connected coach-house style classrooms, to the newer chapel and Performing Arts Centre (PAC). As mentioned, pre-prep classes take place in prefab classrooms, but they’re bright, well-laid out and have plenty of established sections for play and learning.

A new library for the school was built in 2012, which was assisted by funding from the Ranby Parents Group (RPG). The RPG have also helped to fund a new adventure playground with specially-designed equipment for different play levels.

LITTLIES

Not strictly part of Ranby, but run by a parent of a child at the school, Ofsted-registered Big Yellow Door nursery takes babies from 3 months to 23 months. Very few kids leave after nursery, in fact 99 per cent progress on to pre-prep at Ranby. The small team focuses on creating a home-from-home type of learning environment.

ACADEMICS

Ranby prides itself on being a school that focuses on progress, not grades. This ethos permeates through the whole learning structure. The entire curriculum for prep kids follows a structure called Imaginative Learning Projects (ILP). Each project is on topics from the national curriculum, and it’s divided into stages across all subjects. This gives students a chance to engage with a topic in a way that suits them, accessing the detail via more creative means or through technology as well as traditional teaching methods. These projects are changed every half term. During my visit, prep kids were learning about Romans across their different subjects including in cookery classes where they were creating a Roman road out of cake.

For families who value this approach, you’ll be pleased to hear that Ranby doesn’t have SATs or formal examinations. Instead, there’s a baseline assessment made when kids start at the school, which is then tracked throughout the year with individual teaching plans. Class sizes are small – maximum is 20 per class – and none are mixed age groups, so kids get the full attention of teaching staff, and a new teacher each year.

Approximately 30 per cent of pupils joining the senior school have achieved a scholarship or exhibition. The scholarships are awarded in Art, Sports, Music and Academia. These students will have access to specialised resources, lectures, access to a team of specialist sports coaches and expert tuition and individually tailored support with practice.

In terms of some standout subjects, kids are taught Spanish and Mandarin once a week, and there’s a serious focus on IT skills including coding and contextual online safety (the head’s background is in IT so you can directly see his influence here). On my visit, there was lots of excited conversation coming from the pop-up Planetarium in the theatre, and despite the rain, fantastically noisy outdoor undercover lessons and play were taking place in the pre-prep zone.

Ranby also has a massively popular after school activity programme with 94 per cent of students currently signed up. For nursery kids, these are half hour sessions, while for prep students, it’s an hour. Made up of both staff and external agencies, students have access to a variety of extra curricular subjects including a cycling academy, the Ranby news channel, fishing classes at the lake and a Dragon’s Den themed business school.

Notable Old Ranbians include Hannah Webb, who was awarded the coveted Slaughter and May Prize at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford in 2012 for the best paper on Legal History and now works as an Associate for multi-national law firm Linklaters. Adventurer Katie Walter is known for being the youngest person to walk to the South Pole and completed Shackleton’s unfinished journey.

PASTORAL CARE

There’s no on-site counsellor at Ranby but the school has a well-organised policy in place for supporting students.

Children in Years 1-6 are allocated to a House, (St. Alban, St. Benedict, St. Columba or St. Dunstan). Each house is affiliated with certain staff who meet the kids each week. For any issues, their house tutor is on hand to support. The School Listener is also embedded throughout the students’ time at the school – a grandmotherly figure who isn’t tied to staff and can be there to have open conversations about tricky topics, engage in quiet reading or even some outdoor talking time.

Older children have buddy groups and specific talk time built into their weekly schedule, and there’s a school council who meet every other week with the head to put forward their ideas about activities or things that can be better for the students.

BOARDING

Ranby has full time boarding available from Year 2, weekly boarding or an occasional stay (which is very popular with current students) for up to 45 students. From September every year, kids looking to board get a ‘boarding passport’, which is like a transition to staying at Ranby, rather than being expected to board straightaway.

Girls and boys are split, and each dorm room can sleep up to six with communal fun areas and bathrooms. Boarders are housed in the main country manor, which really adds to the homely feel that Ranby promotes. Bedrooms are in keeping with the age of the property, and include some really cute features such as a bedroom panelled with Mouseman oak. Famous Five vibes all round.

As mentioned, occasional boarding is commonplace, and often parents use this as an opportunity for kids to have a playdate with a stay. Ranby has built some fun activities into this. As you can imagine, the Nerf gun specials, games of manhunt and toasting marshmallows are a hit. For £45 with dinner and a cooked breakfast included, this is fab for parents after a night out knowing their littles ones are safe.

THE HEAD

Head teacher David Thorpe joined Ranby House as deputy head in the summer of 2013 from King’s College School in Cambridge, and was appointed head in 2018. He’s been in the education system for 19 years, after originally helping his wife during her teacher training placement and catching the education bug. Prior to this, he intended to join the Fire Service, so whilst teaching, he spent eleven years as an on-call firefighter.

David is clearly a force for good at Ranby, and the fact he lives on site with his family ties him to the school’s close-knit community (he got stuck in with the school’s ground staff over the summer to install new outdoor eating areas for the kids). In fact, chatting to David, you can tell he takes the school’s provision to heart both personally and professionally.

IT is definitely his passion, and he talks earnestly about his experiences getting kids engaged with learning by using technology throughout his teaching life. He joined private education from a state school in order to bring some of his specialism into his teaching practices as he found the state system to be too restrictive.

This refusal to fit in a box has permeated much of David’s impact on the school. His first hire was pre-prep teacher Adam Newton who, along with his skillset, is helping to change the current landscape that only 3 per cent of those who teach two to five-year-olds are men. David also championed the scrapping of SATs and the implementation of the new broad ability curriculum. Though his biggest achievement he cites is being the connection between the school and the families (both kids and their parents) who attend. The opening of the kindergarten came as a response to parents’ needs, as did the shelving of plans to move the school – something that David is personally very pleased about.

Looking to the future, David has his eyes set on improving facilities, but importantly not on growth of student numbers. He, along with most of the staff who I spoke to, believe in a quality not quantity approach so the school’s numbers will remain small to keep that strong contact time.

QUIRKS

The curriculum and class sizes are the obvious things to point out here. With an average of 12 kids per class, students get considerably more time with staff than in much of the competition. This really adds to the deep-rooted connection between teachers and students, so much so that staff eat their lunch alongside the kids in the bright canteen hall every day.

Helping the children to make as many happy memories as possible is paramount, whether that’s roasting marshmallows around a campfire in the woodlands, fishing in the pond or singing and dancing on stage. There is never a dull night during boarding nights.

WRAP AROUND CARE

There’s a free provision for early drop off at 7:45am with breakfast. And after school, there’s an enrichment ‘crèche’ facility until 6:30pm with after-school activities and a cooked dinner for a one-off payment of £14.50 – from age 7 onwards, this is included in your fees, just be sure to book in advance. For events, students can stop over at Ranby with dinner, bed and a cooked breakfast for £45.

MOBILE PHONE POLICY

There’s a strict no phones policy on site, and although students may use their phone on school buses, all electronic gadgets must be handed in at Reception on arrival.

SEND

There are currently 60 students across the school who are supported by specific TAs, with a head of learning success who oversees provision for those with specialist learning needs.

FEES

For kindergarteners (age 2-3), it’s £54.50 for a full day with crèche and for nursery kids (age 3-4) it’s £62.50.

In Ranby’s Early Years Foundation Stage annual fees include the breakfast club from 7:45am. It’s £8,385.00 for reception kids and infants (age 4-7).

In Ranby Preparatory Years, breakfast club, enrichment clubs and evening tea until 6:30pm are included in your fees. For Years 3 & 4 (age 7-9), it’s £13,143.00 and for Years 5 & 6 (age 5 & 6), it’s £13,755.00.

For boarders, 2 nights a week is from £16,203.00 to £16,815.00, and from Mon-Sat, it’s £20,274.00 to £20,886.00 depending on your child’s age.

Sibling discounts are available once the second child enters the prep years, and
bursaries are available too. For Force Families, discounts are available. These are means-tested by the school’s finance department and reviewed every year.

TRANSPORT
For an additional fee, there are school bus service options covering four zones on eight dedicated routes. Find out more here.

WORD ON THE GROUND

Parents are truly involved at Ranby. For some, this is a terrifying concept but for Ranby, parents are the lifeblood of the school. And they absolutely feel as much ownership as the staff in making sure students can thrive in a supportive and homely environment. The Ranby Parents Group (RPG) have a monitored WhatsApp group for each year group, and act as the link between the school and the kids. The group regularly fundraises for the school and supports new parents with any questions.

The reason they put in so much effort? Because parents love what Ranby has to offer. From the focus on the whole child to the personal contact they have with staff to the site itself, you’ll find loads of great reviews for the school from parents across social media sites and forums.

THE MUDDY VERDICT

Good for: Kids who enjoy a more nurturing and close-knit environment in the countryside. Outdoor play and education is a big part of Ranby’s offering (and there’s a lovely new outdoor dining area), so if your little ones love the forest and the fields, they’ll love the school.

Not for: Families who are after an intense focus on high achievement with SATS results a specific focus.

Dare to disagree? Ranby House has both family days and online visits available throughout the year. Visit wsnl.co.uk/open to find out more.

Ranby House School, Retford, North Notts

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