James Hooke, Headmaster of Harrodian, on handwritten CVs, car seats in interviews and growing a school from 60 to over a thousand
“There are so many children who get it in the neck from teachers, get it in the neck from parents and don’t really have a proper outlet. These young mentors we train up are fantastic at shedding a bit of light on the issues and trying to find some resolution.”
James Hooke is headmaster of Harrodian in Barnes, on the banks of the Thames. He joined in 1995, just two years after the school was founded, responding to a tiny ad in Tes for a part-time geography teacher. He turned up to the interview with his six-month-old daughter in a car seat, was offered the job on the spot and has never left – four years later he became headmaster. The school then had around 60 pupils aged eight to ten; today it serves over a thousand students from age four to eighteen. Chatting to Henry Faber, James reflects on how to retain a family feel as a school scales, explains the mentoring programme he's built over 19 years and shares what he looks for in the Harrodian DNA: children who are happy to arrive in the morning and sad to leave at the end of the day.
🎙️ Episode highlights
James shows a photo from Harrodian's very first day in 1993: around 45 children, no uniform, no younger or older pupils, just a midpoint of a prep school with big ambitions.
He explains the three relationships that create a family feel: parents to staff, staff to pupils, pupils to parents. Keep all three strong and the community holds.
James talks about "the humanness of the staff" and why giving parents more access to teachers, not less, actually builds trust.
He traces how the mentoring programme evolved: from informal buddy reading to structured training, including a post-GCSE barbecue where Year 11s learn how to support younger students.
James reflects on what's changed in young people: accountability seems harder than it used to be. "If I'm clearly cross that they're late, they look at me like, well, the bus was late so it's not my fault."
His decision-making principle: put the children first. If you're providing well for the children, everything else tends to follow.