HEADMASTER’S WELCOME 

A warm welcome from the Headmaster: Tim Butcher 

I attended Pilgrims’ as a boy. I came back as a teacher and I now have the privilege of being the Headmaster. Like I did, boys arrive at a young age still finding their way in the world and experiencing a great many things for the first time. Up to nine years later they leave with confidence and character, knowing they are ready for what is next because they have been stretched through a culture of personalised expectations. This is what we are about. Not producing specialists, honing just a single talent and building everything else around it. The boy who performs in the drama production on one day is debating a point  in the classroom the next. The boy who sings a solo in the cathedral on Thursday runs out with the 1st XV on Saturday. A leaver may not be sure if they are ready yet, which is a more useful educational outcome than feeling they’re right. The captain serves. The singer leads. We don’t ask boys to choose between these things because we don’t think they should have to. Our aim is to send boys into the world who are, in the best sense, impossible to summarise. Interested in the world around them and interesting to the people they meet – a rare combination with unmeasured value.

None of this works without the people  around the boys here. Pilgrims’ is a genuinely warm community, and that isn’t incidental to our ambition for the boys, it’s what makes it possible. Boys here look out for each another. They form friendships that last well beyond Year 8. They leave knowing how to be a good person in a room, and in a team. These are things that no exam can measure and that no school should stop trying to teach.

Our setting in Winchester is part of this in ways that are hard to separate out. The cathedral, the College chapel, the medieval Pilgrims’ Hall are not just a backdrop. They are a daily presence in boys’ lives, in bringing a sense of something that matters beyond the individual, in the music, in the specific confidence that comes from performing in a space before you’re old enough to be overawed by it. Our relationship with Winchester College stretches that further still, opening up resources, learning opportunities and experiences that very few prep schools can offer. Boys leave Pilgrims’ for a wide range of excellent senior schools. We have a strong scholarship record and we’re proud of it. But we’re equally proud of all the boys who walk into their next school with a sense of self, a love of learning and primed for what’s next.

There’s more to a Pilgrim. Please do come and visit us to find out for yourself – a very warm welcome awaits.

Tim Butcher, Headmaster