VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
Celebrating new life while learning life-long skills
a rich history, the school is set in 50 acres of stunning grounds and has been located just outside Croxley Green in Hertfordshire since 1966. While the school excels academically and pastorally, York House is passionate about inspiring a love of learning with a sense of adventure, while celebrating the importance of a ‘genuine childhood’. Offering a high- quality experience in outdoor education with an onsite small holding housing more than 50 animals, the school is also passionate about art, sport, music, drama and all other aspects of the curriculum. The school is committed to nurturing confident, self-reliant pupils in a safe, caring, positive and stimulating environment.
E
ducation Today speaks to Tara Warren, Smallholding Manager at York House School in Hertfordshire about its fourth season of lambing.
Tell us about your school.
York House is an independent prep school for girls and boys aged 3-13 years of age. From September 2026 it will move to an 11+ co-educational model. Founded in 1910 with
Tell us more about the on-site smallholding at York House. Just over a decade ago we were involved in the filming of a children’s television series for CBBC, called Pet School, on our school site. As a result, a number of animal enclosures were erected in our grounds. It was a very exciting and enjoyable experience, and when the filming was coming to an end, rather than returning the areas of our 50-acre site to their previous condition, we left a couple of enclosures and animal houses in place for us to start developing our own smallholding. At that stage it was a fun, small-scale idea, but we didn’t predict how significant the development
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would later become for our school. Today, our onsite smallholding is currently a permanent home to more than 50 different animals from donkeys, pigs and goats to sheep, deer, and many more. Our animals are not farmed; they are here until retirement.
Tell us about lambing at York House this year.
York House is celebrating its fourth season of lambing this year and it has been even more special for the school as we are now lambing from the ewes we bred back in 2023. We recently welcomed six new lambs born on the school’s onsite smallholding this spring. The children have been fully involved in the lambing journey from the arrival of Mowgli, a Southdown ram who was matched with four of the schools’ Shetland ewes, to observing the pregnant flock while they grazed, as well as being involved in various health checks leading up to their move to the maternity paddock, and finally enjoying the arrival of the lambs which include five rams and one ewe – the children have named the newborns Chandler, Rocky, Polar, Cloud, Matias and Twix.. With the smallholding only lambing a small number this year, we decided not to have our ewes scanned to see the number of lambs that they were carrying. Instead, the ewes received regular health checks to check on their development.
July/August 2026
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