LILFORDIA SCHOOL

“Be Alert” – Agnes Lilford

WELCOME TO OUR SCHOOL

Founded in 1910, Lilfordia is the oldest Independent Primary School in Zimbabwe. A small, single streamed, rural weekly boarding school set amongst beautiful miombo woodland on a 44 ha site approximately 40km from Harare. We are a School that promotes organic growth and allows children to be children in an empathetic and caring environment. A School which prides itself on revealing and nurturing the talent in each child, giving each child confidence through multi-faceted academic and extra-curricular activities.

MISSION

Our goal as a school is to equip our young pupils with the skillset and mindset to enable them to thrive globally.
We foster an enthusiastic, creative community of learners prepared to continue their intellectual, emotional, and physical development.
We promote pupils to grow organically in a unique ethos which allows them to be children as well as appreciating and adhering to good, old fashioned values.
We strive to educate all pupils to the highest levels of academic achievement, to enable them to reach and expand their potential, and to prepare them to become productive, responsible, ethical, creative and compassionate members of society.
We strive to consciously create an environment of respect, inclusion and tolerance of all ethnic, racial, religious and socio-economic backgrounds.

VALUES

The School prides itself on its mentorship programmes/guidance and pastoral care. Contemporary methods pertinent to the generation are combined with 110 years of experience which brings about a unique ethos steeped in traditional morals, manners, and ethics and a focus on good ‘old fashioned values’. Honesty, integrity, empathy, good fellowship, punctuality, responsibility, and the value of ‘Team’.

PASTORAL CARE

The welfare and happiness of pupils, particularly in a boarding school environment, are of fundamental and paramount importance. To ensure this, all pupils have access to 24hr nursing care by a highly experienced nurse and are shepherded and monitored by the Director of Pastoral Care and both domestic and academic staff. Our modern kitchen provides healthy and hearty meals and teas to ensure that the children are well fed and nourished. Bedtimes are highlighted with popular and classic stories read by the attending staff or elaborate plays and skits performed by the pupils.

Lilfordia is a weekly boarding facility with the exception of pupils competing in matches on a Saturday whereby they stay in on Friday night and are collected after matches on Saturday. A bus service is provided to Westgate every Friday and will return pupils to school on Monday morning.

PASTORAL CARE

UNIQUE ETHOS

Lilfordia is renowned for its personal touch and is unique in the way that it is a family-run and wholly inclusive school where every child is equally important. Every member of staff is familiar with each individual child (their strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies), everyone in the school knows everybody else, by name and by nature, and the overall effect is one of family. It has been remarked that whereas adults usually tend to return to the senior schools they once attended when seeking a dose of nostalgia, very few revisit the primary institutions of their extreme youth. Lilfordia provides a striking exception to this general rule, with former pupils from all eras forever appearing to indulge themselves in trips down memory lane, and one cannot help but feel that this phenomenon is due to their having regarded the school as a “home from home” during their formative years.