FELSTED has received a Good Schools Guide Award 2011 for the highest number of points scored by boys at any english school at A-level History of Art.

The Good Schools Guide is the UK’s only impartial guide to British schools and its annual awards celebrate teaching excellence in individual subjects, based on the popularity of the subject and pupils’ performance in it.

Schools winning a subject award have outranked all others in the category for the subject and exam concerned, and the guide concludes that ’teaching is likely to be very good’.

A fifth of Felsted’s sixth formers take the subject at A-Level, with more than half of those who continue to A2 achieving a grade of A or A*.

The classes are a mix of students who also study practical art and those who do not. They are taught at the school by respected historian Nicholas Osborne.

Visits to study art in galleries around the world, including London, Madrid and Paris, support classroom study and Felstedians win places to study History of Art at top universities, recently including Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrew’s and Newcastle.

Many go on to enjoy successful careers in art-related fields, with former students working at Christies and Sotheby’s and running galleries both private and public in the UK.

Four Old Felstedians who have made names for themselves in the architecture, art and design worlds recently returned to the school to inspire current pupils.

Felsted’s arts co-ordinator David Smith said: “History of Art is an extremely important subject. These are the students who will go on to build our cities, design our clothes or shape our interiors.

“Art history combined with creativity is a heady mix.”