There are currently 217 pupils, including 34 boarders at the school. The boy and girl choristers of Durham Cathedral are educated and board at the school, and we accommodate children as day and boarding pupils from Durham and as far away as Europe and Asia.

The Chorister School offers a traditional curriculum, which we believe best prepares our pupils for the many schools to which they may wish to go. We offer a range of subjects aimed at developing knowledge, creativity, leadership, and social and emotional intelligence, fundamental to developing the whole personality.

Children test themselves through a wide range of extra-curricular activities. The games programme encourages a healthy sense of competition, both within the school and with other schools, and also children are encouraged to participate in music, drama and the fine arts. Every year they have their mettle tested through outward-bound adventure holidays where they experience the limits to which they can take themselves and explore their own ability to face and overcome challenges.

Our pupils learn the classical arts of rhetoric, through debating and public-speaking, and every child is taught Latin, thus ensuring that the tenets of a classical education remain. Logic is taught through a rigorous approach to mathematics, with many achieving considerable success way earlier than might usually be expected.

One of the key features of this school’s educational philosophy is to produce leaders – children who can develop into the role-models who will shape the future in all walks of life – in politics, in medicine, in scientific research and in the creative arts. Leadership has long been part of the framework which supports the choral tradition, but now plays equal part within the school’s other areas of endeavour, including prefects, captains of sports, and boarding house monitors. Children are taught to think and act independently; to respect their peers, their elders, their surroundings and themselves; to nurture each other; to be proud of their heritage; and to seek success!