How about basketball or gospel singing? If she enjoys computers she can join CC4G - Computer Club for Girls - pioneered at Kent College in support of the Government's initiative to increase the number of women working in the IT sector. Participation is important at Kent College, so every year we add to and vary the activities on offer to our girls.

Tap, ballet and modern dance are available at lunchtime. At other times, you can find girls watching Spanish films, studying astronomy, learning about and debating current affairs, setting up a company as part of the Young Enterprise scheme or studying the social, economical and political realities of different countries in preparation for the Model United Nations conference.

Almost every school has an annual magazine but at Kent College it is the girls who write and edit the articles, as well as meeting with the designers to agree the specifications and style. It is also the girls who are driving a Fair Trade initiative which campaigns for the school to purchase more Fair Trade products to support disadvantaged producers in the developing world. Charitable work is also a prominent part of school-life with many girls doing community work and every girl involved in fund-raising at some stage in her career with us.

Then there are the trips: A choir trip to Belgium or a drama tour to Kents Hill School in Maine, USA. For a small number of lucky girls each year, there is the chance to spend a whole term on a sports exchange to America or a term's cultural exchange with a girl in Australia. Field trips with the Classics department to Pompeii, with the Art staff to Cornwall, or a safari trip to Tanzania led by the science department. Highlights of the school calendar are events which we do as a whole school community such as the annual sponsored walk and theatre trips to London's West End to see a musical. These are some of the school memories that your daughter will keep forever.

Care of the Individual

Our principal aim for your daughter is for her to gain confidence as she grows up. Whether that confidence comes from seeing herself progress academically, from making close friends, playing for a school sports team, or just from being made to feel she matters, your daughter's self-belief will be an enormous asset to her in everything she does in life.

Life as a teenage girl is certainly not predictable, but we guarantee that we will care for your daughter, provide support for her and make her feel she is known by everyone and, most of the time, understood! This is one of the most important, yet immeasurable advantages of a school of our size. We are a caring, warm and happy school where every individual girl matters to us enormously.

The process starts even before your daughter arrives. One of our staff will visit her in her previous school, find out what she likes doing and make sure she knows how important she is to us. The next step for her is to come to the school in the July before she starts to meet some of her teachers, her form tutor and other girls in her year group. We even organise the new girls into groups so they can easily meet up over the summer if they want to.

If your daughter joins in Year 7 she will have a two-day ICT induction. She will also spend half a day at school before the term begins for a guided tour of the school, to receive her timetable and meet her form group. A positive and happy start makes such a difference.

Form tutors play a pivotal role in ensuring that your daughter' is happy and making good progress; both academically and socially. There are normally about 16 girls in a tutor group so it does mean that she will receive lots of attention and we will know what is going on in her life. The tutor will normally be your first point of contact if you have any problems or want to make the school aware of anything If they wish, girls can choose to see the school's qualified adult counselor or discuss their concerns with the full-time nursing sister. The School's Chaplain is also available to provide support and friendly wisdom. There are special, informal clubs for girls who find it less easy to mix with others which are often run by the Sixth Formers. Our boarders are cared for by a team of well-qualified, experienced staff both inside and outside the classroom, who give individual support and guidance. Each house has a resident housemistress and an assistant whose first priority is the welfare of the girls. The house staff keep in touch with parents, guardians and academic tutors to oversee the development and well-being of each girl. You will soon see, whatever your daughter's character, that Kent College is a wonderfully caring environment where everyone feels valued as an individual.

Sixth Form

Girls find the Sixth Form at Kent College is one of the happiest and most fulfilling parts of their whole school career. they are studying the subjects they most enjoy, strengthening friendships, making new ones and taking on important responsibilities within the school. Some girls choose to start boarding in the Sixth Form as it gives them a sense of independence in preparation for university, as well as the chance to take part in as much as possible at school in their final two years.

In the sixth Form, every girl is part of a new tutor group, made up of a mix of Lower and Upper Sixth Formers. They stay in these groups for the full two years so their form tutor comes to know them well, can help keep them on track and guide them towards the best decisions regarding their future.

The focus of life in the Sixth Form is Tilley House. Tilley provides Sixth Formers with their own base where they have fully equipped areas for quiet study as well as a kitchen and Common Room for relaxation. Tilley is run by the girls, who elect two of their peers to oversee its day-to-day management.

Other girls, meanwhile, are busily engaged with other positions of leadership and responsibility, as Head Girl, Deputy Head Girl, Sports Captain, Liaison Prefect, Heads of Houses, Head of Boarding Houses and Prefects in charge of Music, Drama and Charities, for which they receive special training in leadership skills. In fact, whether they are School Officers or not, every sixth Former has the opportunity to run or manage something, whether it is a club or society or even a fashion show. So you can see that every girl has a good chance of being elected to a post of responsibility.

The main change in the Sixth Form is, of course, the increased focus on academic studies. Full details of the subjects on offer can be requested from the school but perhaps the most important point to make is that, unlike many other schools, we organise the timetable around the subject choices made by girls. It is therefore extremely rare that girls cannot pursue the combination of subjects they wish to study.

Your daughter will also get to know girls and boys from other Sixth Forms at local and national Model United Nations conferences, local Geographical Association meetings, through the Young Enterprise programme and at conferences arranged through World AIMS (Action in Methodist Schools). Other changes that your daughter will experience when she becomes a Sixth Former are the right to wear her own smart clothes and undertaking work experience. There is also an increased focus on university entrance and decisions about her career. The girls benefit from having two fully qualified Careers Advisors in school and up-to-date information on university courses, as well as computer programmes to link courses to careers options and numerous opportunities to attend talks by visiting speakers, a Higher Education Convention, and university open days. The Sixth Form at Kent College is friendly, busy, hard-working and fun.

Our Boarding Community

If you have read this far it will not have escaped your attention that Kent College is a vibrant and exciting place with a strong sense of community and fantastic pastoral care. The reason it has always been so is because we are, at our core, a boarding school. Boarding schools specialise in looking after children 24 hours a day so they have to offer a thriving extra-curricular programme and need to provide excellent care and support.

At Kent College there are three boarding houses, two for older girls and one for younger girls, each with its own housemistress and assistant. We keep the number of boarders in each house relatively small so each house really feels like a big family. Upper Sixth Formers all have their own room, while other girls from the older years tend to share with a friend. The youngest boarders are in bedrooms for three or four girls and have a lot of fun together.

Our boarders come from the UK, from British Services families, expatriate families and from over 20 different other nations.Our core aim is to maintain a good balance of British and overseas boarders in the houses and teaching groups. We are a small, global community learning to respect and understand each other.

Most girls are full boarders who stay at weekends, whilst a number of local girls are weekly boarders who go home on Friday evenings. If you are away on a business trip or if your daughter is taking part in drama performances night after night she can be a flexi-boarder where you pay on a per-night basis.

The way we run the boarding encourages the girls to appreciate the values of a community life. It engenders team spirit, helps girls learn to accept each other's failings and to support each other in times of difficulty. Boarders at Kent College learn to respect their own and other people's property, the importance of being kind and courteous and taking responsibility for one's own actions. In an increasingly individualistic world, these qualities will stand our boarders in good stead.

At the weekend and during the week after lessons, there are a whole host of activities that are arranged primarily for the girls who board. Weekend activities might include a visit to a theme park, cinema or skating rink, a cycle ride or a trip to London for shopping and galleries, craft activities and multi-sport competitions, suited to the age and interests of the girls. The girls are rarely bored and, we are fairly sure they don't watch anything like as much television as they would at home!

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