Millfield School
Molire Molendo
Founded in 1935 by Jack Meyer, a schoolmaster and county cricketer known to generations simply as the Boss, Millfield is a co-educational boarding and day school in the Somerset town of Street, and one of the largest co-educational boarding and day schools in the United Kingdom. It is known around the world for the sheer breadth of what it offers, and for an approach that sets out to find and develop the particular talent in every child, whatever form that talent takes.
Key Facts
Location : Street, Somerset
Type : Co-educational, boarding and day
Age Range : 13 to 18
Pupil Numbers : Approx. 1,300 pupils
Founded : 1935
Motto : Molire Molendo ("Success by Grinding")
Academic Profile
In Year 9, pupils at Millfield follow Nine at Millfield, a programme tailored closely to the individual and designed to draw out each pupil's particular strengths, before taking their GCSEs. In the Sixth Form they study A Levels, and Old Millfieldians proceed to Oxford and Cambridge, alongside leading universities in the United Kingdom and overseas, as well as careers in sport and the arts at the highest level.
Co-Curricular Life
Sport is a defining strength, played across some thirty disciplines with a large team of specialist coaches, and Millfield has been represented at every Olympic Games since 1956. Its facilities are exceptional, including a fifty-metre Olympic-size swimming pool, a four-hundred-metre athletics track, indoor cricket and golf centres, an indoor riding arena, and a tennis centre. The arts are held in equally high regard, with music taught in one of the largest school music schools in the country and performed in Johnson Hall, a three-hundred-and-fifty-seat concert hall, drama staged in the four-hundred-seat Meyer Theatre, and design and media supported by a well-equipped product design department. Alongside these, the school offers an unusually wide range of clubs and societies, drawing on an international body of pupils from many countries.
Admissions Essentials
Pupils join Millfield in Year 9, at age thirteen, with a further intake into the Sixth Form. Entry at Year 9 is assessed through online reasoning tests and an interview, with around two hundred pupils joining each year, and the school interviews every candidate, in person or remotely, which suits families applying from overseas. Sixth Form entry is based on GCSE results, a school reference, and an interview. Scholarships are available for academic distinction, music, art, drama, and sport, alongside awards in areas such as chess, dance, and product design.
In Essence
For a child with a talent worth nurturing, in the classroom, on the sports field, on the stage, or somewhere not yet discovered, Millfield is built to find it and take it a long way, within a broad, international setting where every kind of ability can flourish.