Judges for this year’s Independent School Awards were highly impressed by Thorpe Hall School’s wide-ranging commitment to helping the local community.

The prep school for boys and girls aged 2-16 is based in Southend-on-Sea, an area with significant levels of deprivation. More than a fifth - 21 per cent - of its children experience poverty.

Thorpe Hall aims to enable children in the area to achieve their goals through its programme My Future, My Southend (MFMS), working in partnership with Southend Council’s economic development team, as well as partner schools, Education and Employers, Southend’s Teaching School Alliance, Connexions and Southend Association of Voluntary Services.

The programme will give Southend’s 15,000 primary children the chance to hear about a range of different jobs, as well as the opportunity to meet volunteers from various companies to explore their options for the future.

A pilot event in 2020 saw 900 pupils participate in the first part of the wider project, which will include all Southend primary children from September 2021.

Thorpe Hall is also an official ambassador of the Southend Emergency Fund, working as a strategic lead for all Southend schools. It organised Invisible, an event that offers practical guidance to help parents and staff engage with teenagers to improve their wellbeing, involving more than 135 parents and staff, and representing in excess of 25 schools.

The school has also developed a partnership with the Southend Primary Headteachers Association, hosting meetings, and facilitating links between it and other local and national agencies.

Lead judge John Claughton said: “Thorpe Hall was chosen as the winner because its engagement with the local community of Southend is clearly long term, wide-ranging and deeply embedded, and is a genuine attempt to understand and contribute to the world in which the school dwells.”