St Bernard's Catholic Grammar School

If you want a school where faith and kindness sit alongside high expectations, St Bernard's Catholic Grammar in Slough is worth knowing. It takes children aged 11 to 18, around 1,100 of them, and its story runs a long way back. In 1897 a group of Bernardine Cistercian Sisters arrived from France and settled at Aldin House, a building that had once been a prep school for Eton College. Day girls were first admitted in 1904, and for most of its life this was a girls' grammar. Boys joined from 1989, and the Sisters withdrew in 2006, when the school took its present name.

The Catholic faith sits quietly at the centre of everything here. The school talks about an ethos drawn from the Bernardine traditions of prayer, service and a genuinely friendly atmosphere, where each child is valued and the Christian values of compassion, forgiveness and love shape how children are treated day to day. Faith is woven through the ordinary business of the school rather than kept to one side, and academic ambition and a child's personal and spiritual growth are taken equally seriously.

St Bernard's suits a hard-working child from a Catholic family who will respond to a place where being kind matters as much as working hard. It is led by headteacher Mr Paul Kassapian. Families looking at it for a daughter should know that, although it started as a girls' school, it has been fully co-educational since 1989, so a son or daughter would find a place where they are known, expected to do their best, and looked after while they do.