Malvern College

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Crest Motto	Sapiens qui prospicit ("Wise is he who looks ahead")
Established	1865
School type	Independent, co-educational, boarding & day School
US Grade Equivalent	Grades 8-12
Headmaster	David Dowdles
Location	Great Malvern, Worcestershire, UK
Enrollment	150 pupils/year (approx.)
Total Alumni To Date	580
Average Class Size	13 pupils
Colours	Green and white
Homepage	www.malvern-college.co.uk

Malvern College is a coeducational English public school for pupils aged 13 to 18, founded in 1865. It is located at Malvern, Worcestershire, England, at the base of the Malvern Hills with views over the Severn valley towards Bredon Hill.

It was originally an all boys school, but is now coeducational, having absorbed many buildings of the once adjacent Ellerslie girls school. It is not to be confused with Malvern Girls' College, which is a separate school. Its junior school is called Malvern College Preparatory School (Formerly Hillstone), which again was a separate boys preparatory school until the early 1990s.

[edit] History

Following Malvern's prominence as a spa town in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, and the advent of the railway, the College was founded by a group of mainly local businessmen. It opened in January 1865 to two dozen boys and half a dozen masters. Initially, there were two Houses but expansion was rapid and by 1877 there were six Houses and 290 boys.

In the 1890s the number of pupils nearly doubled and a further four Houses were added, thus creating the broad outlines of the campus familiar to us today. Originally housed in the Main Building, a separate Chapel was also built during the 1890s.

The College Main Building as seen from the Senior Turf

In 1913 the fifteen year old C. S. Lewis was in attendance at the College, an experience which he later was to describe in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy. He deplored the culture as a "burning desert of competitive ambition" relieved only by the "oasis" of pederastic loves between the upperclassmen, known as "Bloods" and the younger students, known as "Tarts." Though he described the school as "a very furnace of impure loves" he defended the practice as being "the only chink left through which something spontaneous and uncalculating could creep in."

The Chapel records over 600 Old Malvernians and Hillstonians who gave their lives in the First and Second World Wars. Further expansion of pupil numbers and buildings continued after the Great War but during the Second World War the College suffered more than any other comparable independent school, being twice ejected and shrinking to half its former size. Required to make way for the Admiralty between October 1939 and July 1940, it found a temporary home at Blenheim Palace.The College underwent a further period of exile from May 1942 to July 1946. Ordered out at one week's notice, the school was housed with Harrow School.

Statue of St George by the Main Building

The College's premises were then occupied by the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), and the modern Defence Research Agency is still sited on former College land.

Since 1946, the College has continued to build new facilities - Medical Centre 1967, Arts Centre 1974, Sports Hall 1977, Technology Building 1992 - and has also played a significant role in the development of educational projects. In 1963 it was the first independent school to have a language laboratory, it pioneered Nuffield Physics in the 1960s, Science in Society in the 1970s, and the Diploma of Achievement in the 1990s. Today's coeducational College came about in 1992 when three successful schools (Malvern College, Ellerslie Girls’ School and Hillstone Prep) were brought together.

Also at the beginning of the 1990s, Malvern College became one of the first schools in Britain to offer the choice between the International Baccalaureate and A-Levels in the Sixth Form.