The Troutbeck School was founded by parents who knew exactly the education they wanted for their children — and built it.

Our family moved from the United Kingdom to the United States in 2007. During those years our daughters were educated within Montessori schools in Maryland and later in Massachusetts. What struck us was not only the curriculum but the habits it builds in children: concentration, responsibility, courtesy, and satisfaction in careful work.

When we settled in Zimbabwe in January 2014, we were determined that this standard of education should continue.

So we established it.

Troutbeck Primary

We prepared a dedicated classroom, appointed a trained graduate teacher, and obtained the full range of Montessori materials to support the primary years. What began as provision for our own family steadily became a small school as other parents sought a similar environment for their children.

Boarding developed gradually, extending the school to families from further afield without compromising the close supervision and settled community that remain central to what Troutbeck is.

The Offices of the Ministry of Education in Nyanga and Mutare have been supportive of our work. Troutbeck is distinctive within Zimbabwe in offering an authentic Montessori setting across the full primary years — not only in early childhood.

Troutbeck Secondary

As our pupils grew older, the same standards of order, attention and academic seriousness that had shaped the primary years carried through into the examination years.

We prepared candidates for Cambridge IGCSE — an internationally recognised qualification that rewards real understanding and sustained effort, and sets pupils up for further study anywhere in the world.

Many schools prepare pupils for Cambridge through intensive drilling in the final months. Our approach is different — small classes, consistent expectations, and supervised work across the full course, so that pupils arrive at examination having understood the material rather than memorised it.

The first cohort, in 2022, achieved nine A grades. The second cohort, in 2024, did the same — different pupils, the same result.

These results do not happen by chance. They arise from steady expectations, small classes, and pupils who learn to take responsibility for their work.

We did not build this school to be fashionable or comprehensive. We built it to be a place where a child could not drift — where the environment itself held expectations, and where those expectations were the same from the first morning of term to the last.

A pupil at Troutbeck wakes to routine, contributes to the household, attends small classes, and moves through the day inside a structure that does not vary. The academic results are one expression of that — and so is the child who returns home more self-sufficient, more helpful, more capable of looking after themselves.

That is what we built it for.

The Directors

We run the school ourselves. Both of us are present and active across every dimension of school life — from conversations with prospective families to coaching Form 4 pupils through their IGCSE examinations, from day-to-day planning to guiding students through their early teenage years. The ethos we founded the school on is one we uphold together, every day of term.

Edwin Davies was brought up in Scotland. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Edinburgh and a doctorate from the University of London. LinkedIn

Grace Mugadza was raised in Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom. She holds a Master’s degree and a PhD from the University of Cambridge.