Although the school's postal address was in Dorset, its site lay just over the county border in Wiltshire, within the parish of Donhead St Mary.

[4] There were three main houses which were named after places where Mary Ward had lived: Newby, Harewell and York.

[5] Over half of the school's pupils were boarders, all of them full-time and organised by year groups into five boarding houses.

[7][8] It was one of the few schools in the county which did not suffer from the new GCSE grading system using the English Baccalaureate introduced in 2010, as candidates achieved a 100% pass rate.

The school's governors wrote that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic had "wiped away" recent financial progress.