Campus & facilities
Spaces built to inspire.
Twenty-two acres on Tungarli Ridge, planned so the day moves between rooms full of light and the green that surrounds them. Every building here was made for the work that happens inside it.
The campus
One campus, read in daylight.
Solenne Hall was laid out in 1962 around a single idea: that buildings should follow the sun. Classrooms face the morning. The library holds the still afternoon light. Sport and the amphitheatre take the open ground beyond.
Nothing is far from anything. A child can move from a science bench to the pool to the dining hall in the time between two bells, and most of that journey is spent outdoors. What follows is a short walk through the spaces that shape an ordinary day here.
Facilities index
Eight places worth knowing. Choose one to jump ahead, or read straight through.
LibraryThe reading roomScience LaboratoriesFour specialist labsAquatics CentreEight lanes, year roundSports HallCourts & strength roomDining HallFreshly cooked dailyArts & Performance WingStudios & a 320-seat theatreOutdoor AmphitheatreLessons under the skyMakerspaceWorkshop & prototypingThe Library
A quiet, light-filled heart.
Two floors of open stacks under a clerestory roof, holding some forty thousand volumes alongside the digital catalogues and journals our senior students lean on for the IB extended essay.
The ground floor is for working aloud: group tables, the research desk, a junior corner with its own low shelves. The upper gallery is silent by agreement, kept for reading and for the long afternoons of revision. Two librarians teach research and referencing as a subject in its own right, from the first year of Primary upward.
Science Laboratories
Real apparatus, real questions.
Four specialist laboratories, one each for biology, chemistry and physics, with a fourth shared bench room for the younger years. Each is technician-supported, fume-hooded where it needs to be, and stocked for practical work rather than demonstration.
Our students run the IGCSE and IB practical assessments here on their own equipment, from titrations to motion-tracking. A prep room and a full-time laboratory technician mean a class can start an experiment the moment it sits down. The microscopy suite next door holds a set of bench microscopes and one digital scope linked to the room display.
Aquatics Centre
Eight lanes, every season.
A twenty-five metre, eight-lane indoor pool, heated and covered so the monsoon never closes a lesson. Every child learns to swim with us; by the end of Primary, water confidence is something we expect rather than hope for.
A shallow teaching pool sits alongside for the Early Years, with its own gentle entry steps. Beyond lessons, the centre is home to the squad who train before breakfast, and to the staff and boarders who use the lanes in the quieter evening hours. Two qualified instructors and a lifeguard are on the poolside whenever the water is open.
Sports Hall
Room to move, whatever the weather.
A double-height hall marked for basketball, volleyball, badminton and indoor cricket nets, with retractable seating that turns it into the assembly venue when the whole school gathers.
Off the main floor sit a conditioning room with age-appropriate strength equipment, a dance and movement studio with a sprung floor, and changing rooms for both day pupils and boarders. Physical education is timetabled for every year group, and the hall stays open through the afternoon for clubs, fixtures and the weekend programme.
Dining Hall
Cooked here, eaten together.
Three meals a day are prepared fresh in our own kitchen, never reheated from a delivery. Menus run on a four-week cycle built by a nutritionist, balanced across the plate and changed with the seasons and the local market.
Vegetarian, Jain, halal and allergen-aware options are standard rather than special requests, and much of the produce comes from kitchen gardens on the estate. Pupils and staff sit at the same long tables; younger years eat in a first sitting, and the hall becomes the boarders' evening common table once the day school has gone home.
Arts & Performance Wing
Where making is thinking.
A wing given over to the arts: painting and ceramics studios with north light, soundproofed music practice rooms, an ensemble room, and a 320-seat theatre with a proper sprung stage, fly bar and lighting rig.
The theatre carries the school production each year, the music recitals, the debating finals and the end-of-term assemblies. Backstage, students run their own lighting and sound under a technician's eye, so the work of a performance is learned as fully as the performance itself. The visual-art studios stay open at lunch and after lessons for anyone who wants the time.
Outdoor Learning Amphitheatre
A lesson under the open sky.
Cut into the slope below the library, a tiered stone amphitheatre seats a year group in the shade of old trees. Through the long dry season much of the teaching that can happen outdoors, does.
English classes read aloud here, the sciences study the slope's own ecology, and the whole school gathers on the tiers for talks and the smaller assemblies. It doubles as a quiet stage for poetry evenings and student-led debates, and on ordinary afternoons it is simply somewhere good to sit and think. The kitchen gardens and the nature trail begin a few steps beyond it.
Makerspace
A workshop for ideas with edges.
Part workshop, part studio: sturdy benches, hand and power tools, three-dimensional printers, a laser cutter and an electronics bench, with the robotics kit kept close by. It is the room where design and technology stops being a worksheet and becomes a thing you can hold.
Middle and Senior students prototype here for design projects and the science fair, and the robotics and coding clubs meet most evenings. Safety briefings and tool tickets are taken seriously, so younger makers earn their way onto each machine. Nothing is precious: the point is to try, break, measure and build again.
Arrival & Reception
The first room you meet.
Visitors and families arrive through a single, supervised reception under the clock tower, where every guest is signed in and met. It is also where the school nurse, the front office and the admissions team sit, so the people you need are never far from the door.
Morning drop-off and afternoon collection run through a managed gate with a single point of entry, and the boarding houses, medical centre and main quadrangle are a short, sheltered walk from here. When you come for a tour, this is where it begins.
Come and see
Tour the campus.
Photographs only carry so far. Walk the twenty-two acres with us, look into the rooms while they are working, and see how the light moves through a Solenne Hall day.