Ampleforth College

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Ampleforth College <tr><td colspan=2 style="text-align: center; padding: 1em 0em;">Image:Ampleforth crest.jpg</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Dieu le ward (French: "God the protector")</td></tr>
Established	1802
School type	Private, Catholic.
Headmaster	The Reverend Gabriel Everitt OSB, MA, DPhil
Location	Ampleforth, North Yorkshire, England <tr style="vertical-align: top; padding: 1em;"><th align="right">Colours</th><td>Red and Black</td></tr><tr style="vertical-align: top; padding: 1em;"><th style="text-align: right;">Website</th><td>Ampleforth College</td></tr>

Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire is the largest private Catholic mixed boarding school in the UK, and it is occasionally referred to as the "Catholic Eton", a soubriqet also attached at different times to Beaumont (no longer open) and Stonyhurst College (both Jesuit schools) and which was Cardinal Newman's aim in founding the Oratory School as an alternative to junior seminaries and monastic schools. It first opened in 1802 and is run by the Benedictine monks of Ampleforth Abbey, the Community of St Laurence (a house within the English Benedictine Congregation), who trace their origins back nearly 1000 years to medieval Westminster.

Image:Ampleforth Abbey.jpg

1 Overview
2 Press coverage
3 Daughter Abbeys
4 Notable Old Amplefordians
5 External links
6 References

[edit] Overview

The school's primary concern is to educate its pupils in the principles of the Catholic faith whilst providing a thorough and broad-based education. It is notable that its academic admissions policy isn't as academically exacting as that exercised by some other English public schools. As a result, the school is typically between 150 - 200 in the annual league tables of public examination results, although it was ranked 6th nationally in the 2004 "value added" table. The school's administration claims that by looking at the top 50% of candidates (those who would probably have been able to get into more selective schools had they wanted to) the school's teaching appears to score just as well as, if not better than, other famous English public schools. It maintains a strong scholarship set, with about 8% of pupils gaining the offer of a place at Oxford or Cambridge; over 90% go on to university.

There is a famous anecdote of Fr Paul Neville, the school's headmaster in the 1940's, boasting of record offers from Oxford to a prospective parent. "And what of those boys who don't go to Oxford?" replied the parent. "Oh, they run the companies that employ the boys who do" replied Fr Paul.

Image:Big Passage outside Ampleforth College Library.jpg

As a result of the school's association with the monks, religion is central to the life of the school. All pupils are expected to take religious education at GCSE level. Mass is attended by all pupils twice a week, once on a weekday (in the house) and once on Sunday in the Abbey Church.

The school also has an excellent choir (the Schola Cantorum) which sings at High Mass on Sunday and also at a choral Mass on Friday nights during termtime. The choir has made various recordings, broadcasts and tours throughout the world. Also now, there is a girls choir, Schola Puellarum, which was recently noted in both newspaper and magazine. They sing a service every Friday, and they are more frequently joining the boys singing high mass on Sunday. They recently went on a tour to Dublin, and sung in many of the well known churches there.

Though originally only a boys' school, over recent years the school has moved from accepting day girls in the sixth form to the present situation with girls throughout the school.

The school is arranged into houses, with boys (and now girls) living in the separate houses, eating together as a house and playing sport together as a house in inter-house competitions. There are currently ten houses, each named after a Saint: St Aidan's, St Bede's, St Cuthbert's, St Dunstan's, St Edward-Wilfrid's, St Hugh's, St John's, St Oswald's, St Margaret's and St Thomas'. St Martin's Ampleforth is the Prep School for Ampleforth, situated a few miles across the Valley in Gilling Castle

Sport is a large part of school life, with pupils able to participate in a wide variety of sports including rugby, shooting, tennis, cricket and football. As well as many rugby and cricket pitches set in the 2000 acres (8 km²) of the valley, the school runs the St Alban's Centre (SAC), a sports centre with a large hall (also used for school assemblies and official ceremonies), a 25-metre swimming pool, three squash courts, and a fitness suite. SAC is also open to the general public for a fee.

Image:St Thomas's House.jpg

The school also sports a large wall to the south of the Abbey, popularly know as "the Big Wall". It is approximately 10 m tall by 15 m wide and constructed from local sandstone. It was speculated that the wall was constructed to play an Amplefordian version of Fives; the exact nature of this game and its equipment was unearthed in a marginal doodle in a book in the monastic library by Dr Galliver, a school history master, in the 1990s. Nowadays it is often used by members of the school to brush up on their tennis skills, and by the cadet corps for drill.

The college is colloquially known as "SHAC": the popular explanation for this is that the acronym stands for "Senior House, Ampleforth College", although it is believed that it was originally referred to as "the shack" in the early 20th Century because of the parlous state of the old school building at that time; the phrase was coined when the then Head Monitor welcomed the school "back to the old shack" one September. School monitors play an important role in the smooth running of the school and are known as "shackies" to all in the college. The school is situated in a picturesque valley, which has many sports pitches, forest and lakes. There are three lakes remaining of the original five constructed by the Fairfax Family centuries ago. The middle lake is stocked with trout (mainly brown and rainbow, although the occasional blue back has been known).

The Current headmaster is Father Gabriel Everitt OSB, a convert from the Church of England.

[edit] Press coverage

Image:Ampleforth from air.jpg

As the leading Catholic school in the country, its occasional problems make the news, and the school has suffered some poor press coverage during recent years. Several monks who took up positions as teachers have been accused of molesting the children under their care, however these charges have recently been dropped.^[1] Around the same time it was indicted as having taken part in a cartel of price fixing amongst public schools.^[2] The school has periodically experienced a drugs problem due to its position (and lack of nearby entertainment) and the relative affluence of the children who attend.^[3]

The school was the subject of a light-hearted ITV documentary made by director Dan Barraclough shown in 2003 and entitled Ampleforth: My Teacher's A Monk. The aim was to show off the school to a wider audience, although it also highlighted large scale breaking of the school rules on smoking, and what some regard as the lax rules on alcohol. However he did report that he did not witness a single act of bullying, something that used to form the stereotypical English public school image.^[4] Recent pupils thought it was an accurate, if rather superficial, portrayal of the school.

[edit] Daughter Abbeys

In the 70s, a group of Benedictines from Ampleforth founded the Saint Louis Abbey in St Louis, Missouri (the monks there went on to found the Saint Louis Priory School.)