Thomas's College

A Grade II listed building from 1843, five acres of gardens running up to Richmond Park, and a school that did not exist two years ago. Thomas's College opened its doors in September 2025 as the first senior school from Thomas's London Day Schools, the family-run group whose Battersea, Clapham, Kensington and Fulham preps have shaped well-heeled south-west London for half a century. It is co-educational, takes students from 11 to 18, and offers weekly and flexi boarding alongside day places. Under headmaster Will le Fleming, the founding ambition is unusually clear: a three-year sixth form, in-house qualifications sitting beside GCSEs and A-levels, psychology taught to every year group, and a Founding Scholarship scheme that put more than 100 free places on the table in its first September. This is a school to watch, with the caveat that almost everything here is new.

The setting does much of the talking. The main house, a Wesleyan Theological College when it opened in 1843, sits on Richmond Hill within landscaped grounds that adjoin Richmond Park and look down towards the Thames. IID Architects stripped out 1990s mezzanines that had sliced the principal rooms in half, restoring the full-height windows that throw garden light back across the ground floor. The result is a campus with genuine grandeur and a refurbishment cost of £10 to £12 million, opened to students in September 2025. For families used to the busier urban feel of the Thomas's preps, the green, low-rise calm of Richmond Hill is a deliberate change of register.

Ethos is the part that carries over intact. The Thomas's group has run on a single guiding idea for years, the instruction to be kind, and the senior school inherits that culture along with staff and the rhythms of its preps. The stated aim is character alongside attainment: students are meant to leave with what the school calls inner strength and outward assurance, a strong sense of social responsibility, and the habits that come from being givers rather than takers. Psychology taught from Year 7 to Year 13 is the structural expression of this, an attempt to build self-knowledge into the timetable rather than bolt wellbeing on at the edges.

The group itself began in 1971, when Joanna Thomas, an actress and mother of three, opened a kindergarten in a Pimlico church hall to help cover her own children's schooling. Six years later her husband David, a former Gurkha Regiment officer, joined her, and in 1977 the family bought a building in Cadogan Gardens and started Kensington Court Lower School with two teachers and eleven pupils. Their sons Tobyn and Ben Thomas have run the schools since the late 1990s, expanding into the well-known preps at Battersea, Clapham, Fulham and Kensington. Thomas's College is the family's most significant move in a generation: a step out of the prep-school market and into a full 11-to-18 education with boarding, backed by the group's owner Oakley Capital and built on a campus acquired from the American Institute for Foreign Study in 2023.

That lineage matters for parents weighing a school with no history of its own. The teachers, the leadership culture and the be-kind ethos are not theoretical here; they are transplanted from established schools that thousands of London families already know, which is a large part of what gives a brand-new institution its credibility.

A fair word of caution sits over this section. The GCSE record below belongs to the school's predecessor, Thomas's Putney Vale, the senior provision that fed into and seeded the new college; the relocated, renamed and expanded Thomas's College has not yet run a cohort through public examinations from its Richmond home.

On that predecessor record, the GCSE outcomes are strong. Students left with a clutch of top grades across the core subjects, the kind of profile that puts a school firmly in the upper reaches of the tables. The cohort was small, around 27 students completing GCSEs in a single year, which is consistent with a school then operating at modest scale and means the figures rest on a tight group rather than a large year.

For GCSE outcomes the school is ranked 383rd in England and 5th in Wandsworth, a proprietary FindMySchool ranking built from official results. That places it well above the England average, within the top 10% of schools in England. The strong caveat is scale and continuity: these are the numbers of a smaller predecessor, and the new senior school will need several years before it has results of its own that parents can weigh.

The teaching model is the most distinctive thing on offer here, and it is the clearest signal of intent. Alongside GCSEs and A-levels, Thomas's College has built its own in-house qualifications in creativity, communication, critical thinking and connecting ideas, designed to sit on the timetable rather than compete with the exam syllabus. The pitch is that academic rigour and independent, creative thinking can be taught together rather than traded off, and the three-year sixth form is the mechanism: students take on sixth-form responsibility a year early, from Year 11, in a structure the school frames as promoting a love of learning over grade anxiety.

Subject breadth starts early. Philosophy, economics and psychology are taught from Year 7, and students reach a meaningful choice of curriculum in Year 9 rather than waiting for the usual GCSE options point. The Thomas's group's long-standing approach pairs subject expertise with structured staff coaching, the culture that earned the predecessor an Outstanding judgement for quality of education. Inspectors praised the care taken to scaffold learning so that students encounter the same texts and concepts at growing depth as they move through the school: English, for instance, builds a study of Shakespeare across Year 9 and Year 10, each time demanding a more searching analysis than the last. Subject-specific and academic vocabulary is taught explicitly in every year, and the predecessor's students were noted for the sophistication of their written and spoken work.

One practical detail shapes daily learning: the campus is phone-free up to the sixth form, with school-issued iPads and MacBooks used for work instead. For parents weighing the effect of screens on concentration, that policy is a concrete point of difference rather than a slogan. It also fits the wider design, which trades the noise and distraction of a typical urban senior school for a calmer, garden-facing environment in which the school can argue that attention is easier to protect.

Honesty matters more than projection here. Thomas's College has not yet had a leaving cohort from its sixth form, so there are no university destinations, Russell Group figures or Oxbridge outcomes to report from the Richmond school. The three-year sixth form took its first students from September 2025, which means the earliest A-level results and university destinations will follow in the years ahead.

What can be said is structural. The sixth form runs over three years from Year 11, with the school's own critical-thinking qualifications and independent research intended to strengthen university applications, and a dedicated Sixth Form Study Centre giving older students their own base on site. Entry into Year 12 is open to the school's own students and to external applicants at 16+, assessed through the standard admissions route. Parents focused on destinations should treat this as a school whose record is still to be written, and judge it on its programme, its staff and the wider Thomas's track record rather than on published outcomes that do not yet exist.

Thomas's College admits at three main points: Year 7 at 11+, Year 9 at 13+, and the sixth form at 16+, with occasional places in Years 8 and 10 assessed in March when they arise. Selection is by assessment and interview, and as a newly opened school with a 630-place capacity still filling, the competitive picture is very different from an established, heavily oversubscribed senior school. For now the practical question for most families is timing rather than scarcity: registration for several 2026 and 2028 entry points had already closed by mid-2026, with late and occasional-place enquiries still considered.

The headline admissions feature is the Founding Scholarship programme, which is rare enough to deserve its own paragraph. In its launch year the school offered more than 100 places entirely free of charge across Years 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12, open to all applicants regardless of financial means, educational history or background. Selection runs on a bespoke test designed to reward playfulness of mind, potential and character, and explicitly to discourage heavy coaching. Award lengths track the entry year, five years for Year 7 scholars down to two years for Year 10 and 12 entrants, and younger Founding Scholars can apply for a Thomas's sixth-form scholarship afterwards, which can stretch support to as much as seven years. Founding Scholar families make an annual donation worth 10% of fees to the Thomas's Foundation, with a means-tested exemption available so the awards remain genuinely needs-blind. Beyond the founding scheme, the school awards merit-based Master's Awards in drama, music, art, sport and dance, plus exhibition awards, so there are routes in for specific talents as well as all-round ability.

Open events typically run in late June, September and October; families should contact the school for current dates rather than relying on past listings. Because catchment and last-distance-offered data do not apply to a selective independent school, you can use the FindMySchool map search to gauge the commute from home, and the saved-schools shortlist to compare Thomas's College against other south-west London seniors side by side.

Pastoral care is woven into the academic design rather than treated as a separate department. Teaching psychology to every year group from 11 to 18 is the most visible example, intended to give students the vocabulary and self-awareness to manage pressure, relationships and their own learning. The wider aim, stated plainly, is positive physical and mental health alongside academic progress, and the PSHE programme that came across from the predecessor was praised for adapting responsively to current concerns, adding teaching on areas such as nutrition and positive masculinity when students needed it.

The be-kind ethos that runs through the Thomas's group sets the relational tone, and the predecessor school was judged Outstanding for personal development and for behaviour and attitudes, with inspectors noting that warmth and mutual respect ran through every interaction across the school. Character development was framed by inspectors as mattering just as much as academic success. Careers guidance was a particular strength in that setting, built around regular lessons, individual interviews, work experience for every student and talks from external speakers, and the senior school carries that framework forward. Students were also given real responsibility through roles such as house captains, digital leaders and an equality and diversity committee, the kind of structured leadership that the larger college will be able to extend.

For boarders, a deputy designated safeguarding lead has specific responsibility for boarding students, and the boarding accommodation was planned with privacy and safeguarding built in from the start, alongside fire-safety and supervision arrangements set up for the new building. Safeguarding at the predecessor was judged effective with no concerns noted, the baseline a careful family group will expect to maintain.

For a school still in its first year, the facilities are the most concrete promise of what enrichment will look like. The refurbishment delivered a Recital Hall, a Drama Auditorium, a Sports Dome, a gym, a dance studio, three art studios, science laboratories, a School of Design and Engineering and a dedicated Sixth Form Study Centre, all within the restored 1843 building and its five acres of grounds. Outdoor sport is played at Duke's Meadows nearby, where the pitches cover hockey, football, rugby and cricket, and a school shuttle bus to and from Richmond station is folded into the fees to ease the daily logistics.

Sport is built to be inclusive rather than elite-only. The predecessor made a point of every student representing the school in at least one fixture each year, a culture the college inherits, with the Sports Dome and the Duke's Meadows pitches giving the new school the space to run that promise at scale across hockey, football, rugby and cricket.

Music has dedicated space in the Recital Hall and the dance studio, and the Thomas's tradition of jazz, rock and vocal ensembles carries into the senior school, with keen musicians given regular performance opportunities. Drama has its own auditorium, signalling that productions are meant to be a fixture rather than an occasional event, and the three art studios plus the School of Design and Engineering point to creative and technical subjects being given real estate rather than a corridor.

The curriculum itself blurs the line between lesson and enrichment. The Thomas's Options approach, carried over from the group, lets students continue subjects beyond the exam syllabus, from creative arts to less conventional choices such as cooking, and the in-house qualifications in creativity, communication and critical thinking are explicitly designed to value pursuits that a narrow GCSE timetable can squeeze out. A clubs programme runs across the year, and enrichment in the predecessor included theatre visits, outdoor adventure and residential journeys abroad. As with much else at a school this new, parents should ask to see the current breadth of teams, fixtures and societies in person, because the offer is still building towards the capacity the campus can hold.

Fees sit in the upper tier for south-west London, which is to be expected for a new senior school carrying a major refurbishment and full boarding facilities. For 2025-26 the day fee is £10,452 per term for Years 7 to 8 and £10,923 per term for Years 9 to 13, both inclusive of VAT, with a compulsory lunch charge of £415 per term. Usefully, the fee includes the school's shuttle bus to and from Richmond station, and sibling discounts apply where families have children across the Thomas's schools at the same time. Weekly boarding for Years 9 to 13 costs £5,105 per term on top of day tuition, and flexi-boarding is charged at £110 per night, so boarding is an addition rather than an all-in figure. Registration is £200, with a £2,950 deposit on acceptance.

Financial aid is where this school is genuinely unusual. The Founding Scholarship programme put more than 100 fully free places on offer in its launch year, spread across Years 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12 and open to all applicants regardless of income or background, with awards decided by a bespoke test that rewards potential and character rather than tutoring. Founding Scholar families contribute an annual donation worth 10% of fees to the Thomas's Foundation, but a means-tested exemption keeps the awards needs-blind for those who cannot pay it. Alongside the founding scheme, merit-based Master's Awards recognise talent in drama, music, art, sport and dance, with exhibition awards on top. The combination means a family with an able child but limited means has a realistic route in, which is rare at this fee level.

Thomas's College runs as a co-educational day school with weekly and flexi boarding from Year 9 upward. Weekly boarders are in residence from Monday to Friday, with 58 beds in a mix of single, double and quad rooms, and flexi-boarding nights available for families who want occasional stays rather than a full week. There is no full, term-time boarding here, so students return home each weekend.

The site is on Richmond Hill, adjacent to Richmond Park and within reach of Richmond station, which the included school shuttle bus serves. Travel from across south-west London is the main practical consideration, and the weekly boarding option exists in part to make a Richmond education workable for families further afield. Specific daily start and finish times are best confirmed directly with the school.

No track record yet. Thomas's College opened in September 2025, and its first cohorts have not sat GCSEs or A-levels from the Richmond site. The strong GCSE figures quoted here belong to its predecessor, Thomas's Putney Vale, and the new senior school will need several years to build results, university destinations and an inspection record of its own. Early families are buying into a vision and a group reputation rather than a proven senior school.

Fees and the donation condition. Day fees are among the higher tier in south-west London, and even the generous Founding Scholarships carry an annual donation worth 10% of fees to the Thomas's Foundation, though a means-tested exemption is available. Families relying on a scholarship should be clear about that condition before committing.

Boarding is weekly, not full. Boarding runs Monday to Friday only, from Year 9. That suits families who want a midweek base in Richmond but go home at weekends; it does not serve families needing genuine full or overseas boarding.

An unusual curriculum. The in-house qualifications and three-year sixth form are distinctive and ambitious, but they are untested at scale here. Parents who want a conventional, results-first senior school may prefer an established competitor; those drawn to the model should probe how the in-house awards are recognised by universities.

Thomas's College is one of the most interesting independent openings in London for years: a respected family prep group stepping up to a full 11-to-18 education, in a beautifully restored Grade II listed building beside Richmond Park, with a genuinely radical scholarship scheme and a curriculum that tries to teach creativity and character as seriously as it teaches exam subjects. The predecessor's Outstanding judgement and strong GCSE record give real grounds for confidence in the people and the ethos behind it.

It is best suited to families who like the be-kind, character-first Thomas's philosophy, who are drawn to the three-year sixth form and the in-house qualifications, and who are comfortable being early adopters of a school that is still proving itself. The single biggest caveat is exactly that: there is no Richmond-era results or inspection track record yet, so the decision rests on vision, leadership and the wider Thomas's reputation rather than on published outcomes. For pioneers it is a compelling proposition; for parents who want certainty, it may be worth revisiting once the first cohorts have come through.