Inside the £42k-a-year Olympic factory that gave us Tom Daley

What is the secret to Plymouth College having so many current and former students competing at Paris 2024?

Plymouth College, with its crenellated limestone walls and gothic mullioned windows, is elegant but unassuming – at least when compared with the far grander Millfield School, in Somerset, or Whitgift School, on the outskirts of London. And, on paper, its overall offer to pupils is equally proportioned: very good but not the best in show.
“Our facilities are not as great as some other fee-paying schools,” admits Phil Mutlow, the college’s head of sport. Its offer comprises a 13-acre campus, with an additional seven acres of sports fields 15 minutes’ drive away, a 50-station gym and an indoor 25-metre training pool, but this in no way bests Millfield’s private golf course and equestrian centre, or the state-of-the-art sports centre found at Whitgift. 
Every four years, the three schools find themselves in competition over how many former alumni are performing in the Olympic Games. And soon more private schools may be vying for a place on the podium; according to analysis by the Good Schools Guide, the proportion of Team GB athletes educated at fee-paying institutions has risen by 38 per cent since the 2016 Rio Olympics.
But this summer it’s Plymouth College, the underdog, that finds itself on top: six of its alumni are part of the Team GB squad competing in Paris this year, including diver Tom Daley, 30, who won silver at the men’s synchronised 10m platform dive. Millfield and Whitgift schools are in second and third place respectively. 
“Having produced 200 international athletes since 2020, we’re punching well above our weight,” says Mutlow. He believes that when it comes to establishing a world-beating Olympic hatchery, “facilities are actually the least important thing”. 
Grace Moody-Stuart, director of the Good Schools Guide, agrees. She previously told The Telegraph that “facilities are only part of the story”.
She adds: “These schools identify talent at an early age and offer places at considerable discounts, often for free, in the hope of helping realise that sporting potential.”
There can be no better example than Tom Daley himself, who attended Plymouth College on a scholarship.
The Paris Olympics are his fifth games, and accompanying him this year were fellow Plymouth College graduates Myles Pillage, 26, and Kerenza Bryson, 25, both pentathletes, as well as swimmers Honey Osrin, 21, Ben Proud, 29, and Laura Stephens, 25.
“We are best known for our success in aquatic sports, but have had success in a range of other sporting activities too,” explains Mutlow. “Plymouth markets itself as Britain’s ocean city and swimming is a big thing here in general, so that’s where we’ve had our biggest successes.” 
Although students are inspired by the success of the school’s alumni, seeing former pupils compete at the Olympics has almost become commonplace. During the 2020 Tokyo Olympics there was a real buzz at the school, says interim head Adam Carr, as Britain’s star diver Tom Daley – then just 27 – “was much closer to the school in terms of when he had left”. Sixth formers then may have just remembered him from their prep school days.
This year “we don’t have that many current pupils [as opposed to alumni] competing, so there isn’t quite as much excitement as last time,” Carr says. At the Tokyo Olympics, Layla Al Khatib, who was then in Year 10, represented the UAE in the swimming team while 16-year-old Aimee Canny swam in the 4×200 freestyle relay for South Africa. For this year’s Olympics, the college has 11 current students or alumni also competing for international teams. Carr says that pupils were most excited to see sixth-form swimmer Chadd Ng Chiu Hing Ning carrying the flag for Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), his home nation, at the opening ceremony on Friday night. 
But if not the facilities, what are parents sending their children to the £42,000-a-year institution really paying for? It would seem to be the school’s suite of onsite nutritionists, physiotherapists and councillors, as well as its sporting coaches, headhunted to give pupils links to county and national level opportunities. 
Together with Phil Mutlow, top level sporting staff have been brought in to ensure that students find success in rugby, hockey, netball and cricket: college alumni who have found fame outside of the Olympics arena include rugby union centre Henry Slade, 31, who plays for the Exeter Chiefs as well as England.
“Because of the staff we hire, we have those links where we can say, ‘We’ve got a really talented child that we think you should look at selecting’,” says Mutlow. “Often our coaches and staff members are involved in those pathways or have made selection themselves, so have the ability to direct pupils [on] to the right course.”
The school has enjoyed most of its Olympic success in the last two decades or so, says Carr, but sport has been “one of the central tenets of the school ever since its foundation in 1887”. 
In recent years, Plymouth College’s sporting prowess has become a major draw for pupils and parents. The college is open to boarders as well as day students, though three quarters of its pupils are drawn from the local area. “We will identify talented young people in the area and try to support them to join through bursaries or scholarships,” says Mutlow.
Yet the school’s international reputation precedes it. Students whose parents have sent them to Plymouth from thousands of miles away in the hope they’ll become sporting stars include swimmer Ben Proud, in the Team GB squad this year, who grew up in Malaysia. Among sports scholars admitted to the school on the basis of their talent, “it’s probably a 50-50 split of local talent and pupils from other parts of the country or further afield,” says Mutlow. 
The school is small, with just 500 students, and of those around 100 are on a “high performance programme” that involves “after-school, lunchtime and pre-school activities,” Mutlow says, as well as the compulsory two-hour weekly sports session in which all pupils must take part from the junior school right up to sixth form. 
But that said, “we’d never force someone into some intense training programme,” says Mutlow. “If a child says they’re serious about rugby or another sport, of course we’ll say we can help, and take them to whatever level they might be able to achieve.”
As such “we’re not a high performance academy – we care more about being a school where we teach people about being fit and healthy,” he explains. Far from a military-style training camp, “we’re just as happy to see a student playing for the England national team as we are to see them playing for the local club, if it’s something that they keep up for their whole life”. 
At this school, sport is central, but it’s not the be all and end all. The school also offers drama and music as extracurricular activities and “we do still send pupils to Oxford and Cambridge, or off to Imperial, to do subjects like engineering,” says Carr.
“What makes us as a school proud, and me as a head proud,” says Carr, “is whenever students come back and tell us about the exciting things they’re getting on with.” He says it’s the confidence that sports gives to pupils that “prepares them for life outside the gates”. 
For Mutlow, the secret of the school’s sporting prowess lies in the fact that its pupils know what it’s like to be “sitting next to an Olympic champion in class and thinking, ‘You know what? I can do that’.” Although after two decades of Olympic success, for pupils at Plymouth College, sharing a classroom with a world-class athlete must seem very normal indeed.