The Elms School

The Elms was founded in 1614 by Humphrey Walwyn of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, and is the oldest prep school still on its original site. The original school house was based on a farmhouse, built in the 1550s, on the edge of the village of Colwall in the lee of the Malvern Hills. According to The Rise of the English Prep School, the official inception date of The Elms as a prep school dates back to 1867. In 2014 The Elms School celebrated its 400-year anniversary, and named a new dormitory after the late former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It maintains close links with the Grocers' Company, and receives financial assistance from the company's charitable arm.

The school occupies a rural estate at the foot of the Malvern Hills, including a working farm and an on-site equestrian centre; its grounds are variously described as covering around 40 acres or, including farmland, about 110 acres. The Elms keeps Hereford cattle, Gloucester Old Spot pigs and Shropshire sheep, which pupils help to tend and show at county agricultural shows; meat from the farm is used in the school kitchens and sold to parents, and each class tends a garden whose produce is also used in the kitchens. The school's farm, much of which is run by the pupils as an extra-curricular activity, has shown pigs at the Three Counties Show since 1989, winning the supreme pig championship…

The old endowment came under scrutiny from the Charity Commissioners and the Board of Education around the turn of the 20th century, and the Bishop of Hereford held an enquiry in 1904. Following the Education Act 1902 and a reorganisation completed in 1909, Walwyn's charity was reconstituted as the Walwyn Educational Foundation, with the endowment redirected chiefly to scholarships, while responsibility for the elementary school passed to the local education authority. The fee-paying boarding school had been sold privately to Charles Black around 1904, separating it from the charity school.