About Solenne Hall
A school built around daylight.
For more than sixty years we have held to one idea: that children learn best in the open, in good light, among adults who take them seriously.
Our founding
Begun in 1962, on a hillside chosen for its light.
Solenne Hall was founded in 1962 by Margaret Solenne, a teacher who had grown tired of dim rooms and louder ambitions.
She bought twenty-two acres on a ridge above Lonavla, in the Sahyadri foothills, where the monsoon greens the hills and the morning sun arrives early and stays. Her brief to the first architects was plain: build rooms that fill with daylight, leave the trees standing, and put nothing between a teacher and the child in front of them.
Three things have not changed since. We keep classes small enough that no pupil is anonymous. We teach with real materials, in real laboratories and studios, not from a distance. And we believe an education is measured less by what is covered than by what is kept: the curiosity, the care, the habit of finishing the work well.
Today Solenne Hall is a day and boarding school of thirty-two nationalities, teaching the Cambridge IGCSE and the IB Diploma. It has grown a good deal. Its first idea has not.
We do not prepare children for a distant future. We teach them to be fully present in the work in front of them.
From the founding charter · 1962
What we hold to
Four words, kept honestly.
Not a motto on a wall. The values below decide how a lesson is planned, how a difficulty is met, and how a child is spoken to.
Curiosity
We protect the question. Lessons begin with something worth wondering about, and a child is never hurried past the part they find interesting. Curiosity, kept alive, does the heavy lifting of an education.
Care
Every pupil is known by name, by their tutor and by the adults around them. Care here is practical: it notices the quiet child, follows up on the off day, and treats wellbeing as the ground rigour stands on.
Craft
We believe in real materials and finished work. A proof carried to the end, an essay rewritten, a joint cut true. The habit of making something well, again and again, is its own quiet form of confidence.
Courage
Ambition without fear of the wrong answer. We ask pupils to attempt the hard thing, to speak in front of the room, to lead a project and own its rough edges. Growth lives just past the comfortable.
A day in the life
From the first bell to the last lamp.
A Solenne day has a rhythm, not a rush. It begins in the garden and ends in the common room, with room left to think in between.
From the Head
A welcome, and a small promise.
When families visit, they often ask what makes Solenne different. I tend to give the same answer: we have resisted the temptation to grow louder.
We could fill more hours, add more subjects, post more results. Instead we keep the day unhurried enough that a teacher can notice when a child has stopped understanding, and stop to help. That noticing is the whole of it. It is why our classes stay at eight pupils to a teacher, why every child has a tutor who follows them for years, and why prep is supervised by adults who know what the morning held.
The promise is simple. Your child will be known here, taught well, and asked to attempt difficult things in a place that has their back. Come and see whether that is true. I am usually somewhere near the courtyard.
Anjali Menon
Dr. Anjali Menon · Head of School · with us since 2009
Campus & sustainability
A campus that practises what it teaches.
It is hard to ask pupils to care for a place and then heat it carelessly. So the campus carries its own weight, and the children help run it.
A rooftop solar array covers the better part of our daytime power. The kitchen gardens supply most of what the dining hall serves in season, tended on a rota that every house joins. Greywater feeds the orchard, food waste returns as compost, and the buildings were placed to be lit and cooled by the hill itself before a switch is ever flicked.
Pastoral care
Small enough to be known.
At eight pupils to a teacher, no one slips to the back of the room. Care at Solenne is structured, not assumed.
Every child belongs to a tutor group of twelve and keeps the same tutor for years, so that someone always holds the long view of how they are doing, not just this week's marks. Houses give boarders and day pupils a second family. A counsellor and a nurse are on campus daily, and the conversation between home and school is frequent, plain and early, never left until a report is due.
A tutor for years
One adult who follows each child across stages and knows the whole of their day.
House belonging
Mixed-age houses that mentor downward and look out for one another upward.
Help on hand
Counsellor, nurse and learning support on campus, woven into the ordinary day.
See it for yourself
The ethos is easier to walk than to read.
Spend a morning on campus and meet the people who will teach your child. Everything on this page is best understood in the light it was built for.