Sir Roger Manwood's School

If your child is able and self-motivated, and ready to take ownership of their own work, Sir Roger Manwood's School is one to consider. It is a co-educational grammar in the cinque port town of Sandwich, on the East Kent coast, fully state-funded with no fees, taking around 150 pupils into Year 7 each year through the Kent Test. The school has a long history: founded in 1563 by Sir Roger Manwood as a free grammar for the townspeople, it has stood on its present site since 1895. The Victorian redbrick buildings sit on a quiet, leafy residential road, with polished wooden floors and well-kept grounds that the Good Schools Guide says give the place "a private school feel". When Manwood died, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, himself a Kent man, wrote him a Latin eulogy.

This is an academic school, and it says so plainly. Pupils told the Good Schools Guide "you have to expect to work", with the responsibility placed on the child to keep up and stay organised. Parents feel the pressure is "about right" rather than relentless, and pastoral care is called a "selling point", with staff keeping a subtle eye on things rather than running a one-size-fits-all system. The old boarding house, a manor-house-style building known as the Grange, now houses the sixth form, where everyone takes three A levels.

Manwood's suits a child ready to take charge of their own learning, whose family wants a grammar with a settled, traditional feel rather than the intensity of a hothouse. It is led by headteacher Ben Pennells, who joined in January 2025. For a child who likes the idea of growing up somewhere with this much history under its feet, it is a calm, grounded place to do it.