Gardiner House

Gardiner House provides accommodation for boarding girls aged from ten to sixteen (Years 6 to 11).  Around twenty-five girls reside here, half being weekly boarders from Sunday evening until Friday, and the others being full time residents.  We also have a number of regular visitors who stay one or two nights per week, because of swimming or other sporting or academic commitments.

The house has a variety of facilities, including a TV Room, a kitchen in which to makes toast or other snacks, a prep/drawing room in which the younger ones do their evening prep, and a newly created games room in which is located a table-tennis table and other acquisitions.  There is a self-contained laundry which older girls can use, though laundry is done daily for the younger girls and for those older ones who prefer it.

The younger girls start off in rooms of three or four, moving to smaller rooms of two, and then to single rooms as they grow older.  We try to encourage a pride in looking after bedrooms, by the personalising of them as they would do at home and also in taking responsibility for keeping them clean and tidy.  Taking responsibility is a recurrent theme of boarding at Saint Felix, in preparation for life after school.  Our occasional house sleepovers provide an opportunity for friends to come and stay, bringing boarding a little closer to the home environment.

Boarding life during evenings and weekends includes a wide variety of activities, either within the school grounds or outside.  We make good use of the swimming pool, sports hall and climbing wall whilst ten-pin bowling, cinema, skating, beach walks, go-karting, laser quest, etc., feature regularly.   Southwold itself being a small and safe community is an ideal environment for the younger boarders to become gradually more independent during Saturday afternoons, whilst further afield Lowestoft or Norwich have a bigger variety of shops for older pupils buying their own clothes or whatever.