By Natalie Harling, Co-Chair of Governors, Hunter Hall School, Penrith
I have been connected to Hunter Hall School for most of my adult life. My children grew up here. I know this school the way you can only know a place when it has shaped the people you love most: when you have stood in the playground watching them run towards their friends, when you have sat in parents’ evenings listening to teachers who genuinely know and want the best for your child.
When my youngest left in 2021, I was already Chair of Governors having previously been a Governor for many, many years, I could have walked away. Instead, I stayed in a role which enables me to give something back to a school that had given so much to my family.
Hunter Hall is unlike any school you have ever seen. Tucked into 19th-century farm buildings in the Eden Valley, just outside Penrith in Cumbria, it is home to just 80 children, from pre-school through to eleven. A small school that achieves outstanding results.
During the summer months of last year, we did something bold. Under our headmaster, Paul Borrows, the school launched a new strategy, Tomorrow Starts Here, built on a conviction that education is not merely preparation for the future, it is the beginning of it. Far from a school adrift, we were building towards something.
As a lean and efficiently run institution, the school has never had significant financial reserves. Despite facing rising costs for over a year, the leadership team was dedicated to finding further efficiencies wherever possible, all without compromising the high-quality education we are known for.
So when we sat down last autumn for an extraordinary governors meeting, I understood what was at stake in a way that went beyond governance and finance. It was personal.
There were teachers in our school who had already taken pay cuts, people who had chosen Hunter Hall not for the salary, but for what it stood for. As a governor, my duty was to look those loyal, committed professionals in the eye and tell them there might not be a job at the end of it.
And then there were the children: their friendships, their routines, the lives their families had built around this school. Some had less than two terms to go. The disruption was not abstract, it was real, and it would fall on people who trusted us completely.
The pressure had been building for some time. The government’s decision to add VAT to independent school fees sent ripples through every school like ours. For families already stretching to give their children something they believed in, the numbers no longer worked. One by one, difficult decisions were made. Numbers fell, and the financial picture darkened.
By November 2025, we were left with a choice that no governing body ever wants to face.
We could close quietly, sparing ourselves and the school the exposure of a public appeal. Or we could ask for help.
Asking felt terrifying. It meant admitting, publicly, that a school approaching its 40th year was in crisis. It meant trusting that the community we had served, and that had in its own way always sustained us, would respond. I believed they would. And we were not giving up without trying every last thing. I had seen it in the way this community works. In the way current parents speak about the school to people they meet. In the messages from former pupils, now adults building their own lives, who still talk about their time here as something that mattered. Hunter Hall has always been more than a school. It is a community that happens to have classrooms.
On 26 November 2025, we launched our Save Our School appeal. What happened next is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. The donations came quickly. From current parents, yes. From former pupils. But also from strangers. People who had no connection to Penrith, who had never met a single child from Hunter Hall, who read our story and decided, on the strength of it, that this school was worth saving. They did not owe us anything. They gave anyway. By 3 December, we had raised more than we needed.
I have spent nearly three decades working in education, across schools and organisations throughout England, Scotland and Wales. I have seen communities mobilise and I have seen them stay silent. What happened here was rare. It only happens when a school has built something real, when the relationship between an institution and the people it serves is genuine, not transactional.
What the appeal revealed was not a school that needed rescuing. It revealed a school whose value had never been in doubt, only in danger of being lost.
We are still here because people believed we were worth saving. That belief came from somewhere. It came from forty years of children who arrived curious and left capable. From parents who trusted us with something irreplaceable and found that trust was honoured.
From a founding instinct going all the way back to 1986, when a group of local parents gathered around a dining table in Penrith and decided the world needed a different kind of school. They did not have a benefactor or a building. They had a conviction. That is where Hunter Hall came from. Community, not capital. And forty years later, community is what saved it.
That instinct did not disappear. It was dormant. And when we needed it, it came back.
I want to say something directly to anyone reading this who has assumptions about what an independent school is. People picture grand buildings. Long corridors. Fees that signal who belongs. Yet nothing could be further from what we are. At Hunter Hall there is no grandeur, no architecture designed to impress. Look us up on the web, and you will see what I mean. Hunter Hall truly is a school like no other and it’s also been named one of the top 100 preparatory schools in the country.
What there is: small classes where every child is genuinely known. Subject specialist teachers who do not just know their subject. They know your child. Many of them have been here for years, and you feel that the moment you walk through the door. This is not a place where teachers pass through. It is a place they commit to.
And at the centre of it, a headmaster in Paul Borrows, an innovator who led this school through the hardest year it has ever faced and emerged with a strategy built on a conviction, not a slogan. Tomorrow Starts Here. Education does not merely prepare children for the future. It is the beginning of it. If you are considering Hunter Hall for your child, I want you to know what you are choosing. You are not choosing a school that trades on its past. You are choosing a community that has been tested, and has shown, beyond any doubt, what it is made of.
Someone once said it takes a village to raise a child. In November 2025, a village proved that it will also fight to save the place that raises them.
And thanks to that village, we’re now looking forward to properly celebrating the 40th anniversary year in June with our children, staff, parents, alumni and wider school community knowing that we have their ongoing support. Tomorrow really does start here. It nearly did not. And that makes today all the more worth protecting.
Natalie Harling is Co-Chair of Governors at Hunter Hall School and Director of Business Development, Marketing and Communications for The Outward Bound Trust.