A School for the Creative Mind
Hurtwood House was founded in 1970 by Richard Jackson, who looked at the English public school system and decided it was failing creative children. The institutions he saw were complacent and conventional, with little room for pupils whose talents lay in theatre, film, music, or art rather than Latin prose or the cricket field. Jackson set up a sixth-form-only boarding school in an Edwardian mansion on the edge of Leith Hill, gave it a 200-acre estate in the Surrey Hills, and built a curriculum around creative expression alongside academic rigour.
The gamble paid off. Hurtwood House is now widely regarded as the best school in England for performing arts and creative media. Its theatre, film studios, recording facilities, and television studio are professional-grade, and the school's productions regularly win national and international awards. But this is not an arts-only institution – the academic programme runs alongside the creative work, and results are consistently strong.
The Alumni
Emily Blunt arrived at Hurtwood in 1999 and appeared in numerous school productions, most notably as the lead in Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Within six months of leaving, she was sharing a stage with Judi Dench in the West End. Hans Zimmer, the film composer whose scores for The Lion King, Inception, and Dune have earned him two Academy Awards, attended the school in the 1970s. Vanessa Kirby, the actress known for The Crown and the Mission: Impossible films, is another former pupil.
Life at Hurtwood
Around 340 students attend, all of them boarders. The atmosphere is deliberately different from traditional boarding schools – students are treated as young adults, the dress code is relaxed, and first-name terms with staff are the norm. The setting helps: the school sits deep in the Surrey Hills, surrounded by woodland and farmland, miles from the nearest town. It is a school that takes creative ambition seriously, and the results – both on stage and in the exam hall – bear that out.
