Claires Court School

Claires Court School was founded in 1960 by the Wilding family as a small co-educational preparatory school in Maidenhead, Berkshire. The school has remained in continuous family ownership through three generations of the Wilding family — making it unusual among UK independent schools, which are predominantly governed by charitable trusts. The current Principal is James Wilding, the third-generation family principal, and his sisters and family members hold senior teaching and administrative roles across the school.

Claires Court today operates as a three-site Diamond-model co-educational independent school across central Maidenhead. The Junior Boys' School and Junior Girls' School are on separate sites in central Maidenhead, and the Senior School is on a rural Thames-adjacent campus at Cox Green, with sports and rowing facilities at the riverside Bisham Abbey campus. The Diamond model means that boys and girls are educated separately in the senior years (Years 7-11) and reunited as a single co-educational Sixth Form (Years 12-13). The school educates around 961 pupils across the three sites ages 4-18.

The school is a member of the ISA and the IAPS (for the Junior Schools) and is inspected by the ISI. The Thames-adjacent location supports a strong rowing programme, and the school maintains traditional independent-school co-curricular activities — drama, music, modern languages and sport — alongside a particular focus on engineering and technical apprenticeship pathways for sixth-formers not progressing to Russell Group universities.

The school's profile is a mid-tier Thames Valley independent — strong A-Level results, broad-access tuition fees, and a strong family/local-community ethos reflecting the unusual family-ownership model. The school operates a bursary programme intended to provide local Maidenhead families access regardless of means.