Mayville High School

General information

We are an independent co-educational day school in the heart of Southsea with around 500+ students on roll. We currently admit students within the 2-16 age range. We are a split site: the school has four large teaching sites and our playing fields are at Cockleshell, Eastney, which is less than a 10 minute journey away. We are situated near Portsmouth’s rich historic heritage, a stone’s throw from the Solent and close to the city’s cultural wealth. Founded in 1897 there is a strong emphasis on traditional disciplines yet Mayville adopts innovative teaching methods to help promote learning.

Our size is our strength, we are big enough to offer pupils a wide range of opportunities yet small enough to treat each pupil as an individual. Class sizes are small, enabling each pupil’s individual learning needs to be fully met. To ensure that we provide a bespoke education to each child within the senior school we split the forms into two so that the students are taught in sets of around 12. This is an unparalleled staff-student ratio in senior school education.
The philosophy underlying Mayville’s curriculum is that it is the happy child who will learn and the one with self- respect who will best meet his or her potential. Our initial aim, therefore, is to create an atmosphere for learning which is enjoyable, exciting, challenging and inclusive, but where each pupil feels secure and respected for what they bring as an individual to the school community. The defining features of a Mayville education have always been: a pastoral care system outstanding enough to nurture the individual child into gaining knowledge of themselves and an appropriate academic bite, the constant striving towards academic excellence tempered perhaps by the belief that true success is that magical combination of both ability and temperament which is refined over a lifetime.

Shortly after becoming co-educational Mayville initiated the idea of teaching boys and girls in separate parallel classes. Over the years this has been successfully implemented throughout the school with all subjects being taught separately at Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 (with the exception of some of the humanities subjects in Year 8 and Year 9), and the core subjects taught separately at Key Stage 4. The pupils like the arrangement, they feel it gives them the "best of both worlds.”

Teachers here are passionate about their subject and they provide an education robust enough to enable great success in public examinations but equally an education that will withstand the test of a lifetime, the best possible pastoral care that makes every pupil feel they are as important to the school as it is to them, outstanding co-curricular provision, first-rate facilities and, we hope, pupils who care as much about the success and happiness of their peers as they do about themselves. We have long been one of the most unique schools in Hampshire and the school has always been an inspirational place where a remarkably warm, inclusive and caring ethos guides all students to achieve their very best.

You are warmly invited to visit us to see for yourselves the unique schooling Mayville has to offer.