Watford Grammar School for Boys

If your son is the sort who is just as happy in a rehearsal room as on a sports pitch, Watford Grammar School for Boys gives him room for both. It is a popular, partially selective boys' school with a Church of England character and a long charitable history, descended from a free school founded in 1704 by Elizabeth Fuller, a local philanthropist, to teach Watford children to read, write and 'cast accounts'. That founding is still marked each year with a Founder's Day service, and the school keeps Watford Grammar School for Girls as part of the same family.

Music runs deep here. The Good Schools Guide reports parents describing it as 'dazzling', with real breadth rather than a narrow classical focus, and the school shares the Clarendon Muse, a purpose-built concert hall, with the Watford School of Music. Sport sits alongside it on equal footing, with boys regularly representing county, regional and national teams, and debating and chess have earned a national name too. The Guide describes boys who are talkative and courteous and serious about their studies, though not without a twinkle in their eye. Among those who passed through is Gerald Moore, who became one of the great piano accompanists of the last century, a fitting alumnus for a school this musical.

Watford Grammar School for Boys suits a capable, well-rounded boy who will make the most of both the classroom and the music and sport on offer, and who will take to the academic stretch rather than feel pushed by it. Under headmaster Ian Cooksey, it is a school that lets a boy be good at more than one thing.