The school is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. Called a public school, Canford's fees for the 2023/24 academic year were £15,173 per term for boarders. The school is consistently ranked among the best co-educational independent schools nationally. In 2014, and again in 2016, Canford was among four runners-up for "Public School of the Year" in the Tatler School Awards and received the top award in 2019.
The school has an enrolment of 660 students, the highest in its history, aged between 13 and 18 spread across seven boarding and three day houses. Canford School counts among its alumni high-ranking military officers, pioneers in industry, computing, and economics, as well as senior figures in the Arts and Sciences.
History
Canford Manor was particularly associated with John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster – the third of five surviving sons of Edward III of England. The Duke exercised great influence over the English throne during the minority of Richard II's reign, and the ensuing periods of political strife. Records suggest the Canford Manor was used as a principal residence of John of Gaunt for some time. Of that early period, only the Norman church and 14th century refectory known as John O' Gaunt's Kitchen remains. The main building, constituting the nucleus of the school, was designed by Edward Blore and later by Sir Charles Barry in the early and mid 1800s. The school itself was founded in 1923, having been "provided with a nucleus of boys and staff from a small private school in Weston-super-Mare".
Results
In 2023, the school had a pass rate of 72% for pupils aged 9–7 at GCSE and 66% of pupils achieved A*/A at A level (87% of pupils achieved A*-B).
Inspection
As of 2024, the school's most recent integrated inspection by the Independent Schools Inspectorate was in 2012. The headline judgement for each section except Governance was Excellent; the headline judgement for Governance was Good. There was a focussed inspection of compliance, jointly with educational quality, in 2018. All compliance standards were met, and educational quality and children's personal development were judged excellent. There was a regulatory compliance inspection in 2022, at which the school was found to meet all the standards.
Assyrian frieze
In 1992, a lost Assyrian stone relief was rediscovered on the wall of "the Grubber". Although it is at first sight rather unlikely that such a valuable item should be found on the wall of a school tuck shop, the history of the school explains how the relief came to be there. It had been brought back from the site of Nimrud in northern Mesopotamia (Iraq) by Sir Austen Henry Layard along with other antiquities which were displayed at Canford before it was a school. Originally Canford had been a private country house (known as Canford Manor), designed by Edward Blore and improved by Sir Charles Barry, and the residence of Layard's cousin and mother-in-law, Lady Charlotte Guest and her husband, Sir John Josiah Guest. At that time, the building now known as the Grubber had been used to display antiquities and was known as "the Nineveh Porch". It was however believed by the school authorities to be a plaster copy of an original which had been lost overboard during river transit and little attention was paid to it after the school was established. A dartboard was even hung in the Grubber close to where the frieze was displayed. It was John Russell of Columbia University who identified the frieze as an original, one of a set of three relief slabs taken from the throne room of Assyrian King Assurnasirpal II (883–859 BC). A new plaster copy now stands in the foyer of the Layard Theatre at Canford and a number of "Assyrian Scholarships" are available, funded from the sale proceeds which also helped pay for the construction of a new sports facility.
The original relief is now part of the collection of the Miho Museum in Japan.
The Layard Theatre
The Layard Theatre is situated inside Canford School and is open to the public.
The school is one of four in the United Kingdom with a real tennis court (the others being The Oratory, Radley and Wellington College). It is unique among these schools in that its court dates back to 1879 when it was a country house, whereas the others have all been newly built for the schools since 1990.