Just Give It a Try: How Ashley Manor Prep Arrived at the School Esports World Championships

School Blog Profile | DAIGON Esports | SEWC 2026

Ed Parkin did not have a plan.

There was no strategy meeting, no budget proposal, no vision document. There was an email that arrived about a new eSports competition from the ISA, a computer room that had been running Minecraft for twenty years, and a group of children who already enjoyed playing Minecraft.

"An eSports team wasn't planned at all," Ed says. "It was a bit of an experiment."

In November, Ashley Manor Preparatory School is going to Malta.

The Email That Started Everything

Ed Parkin teaches computing at Ashley Manor. He is also, in the way of small prep schools, someone who does a great many other things: Deputy Head, Head of Computing, and runs the Friday Computing club. The email came through the ISA mailing list. Ashley Manor had always been part of the Independent Schools Association through its sports programme, rugby and cricket and football and netball and hockey, and so the school was on the mailing list. Someone in the sports department forwarded it to Ed. It was from DAIGON Esports, advertising a Minecraft competition.

Ed looked at it. He thought about the Computer Club his school had been running, in one form or another, for the best part of twenty years. He thought about the Minecraft server Ashley Manor had maintained throughout that time, the one the children had always gravitated towards. And he thought about a few students he already knew, children who were quietly brilliant at this kind of thing, who had never had a competition to aim at.

He decided to give it a try.

A Small School With a Long History

Ashley Manor Preparatory School sits at the heart of Cheltenham, one of the leading prep schools in the area. It is a small school, deliberately so. The families who choose it, Ed explains, choose it precisely because small means known: known quickly, known well, known as individuals.

The school became Ashley Manor as part of a broader reorganisation when the school joined the Alpha group of schools in 2021. Those Year Sixes who go through Ashley Manor often move into St Edward's as Year sevens, and some of them, as Ed has already discovered, now come back to the Friday club.

The ethos runs on three words: Believe, Strive, Achieve. Ed brings them up without being prompted when asked how the school approaches what it does.

"That threads itself through everything we do as a school," he says. "And most definitely with esports as well."

For children who had never competed formally before, who had never had a team or a fixture or a result to work towards, the structure of competitive esports turned out to fit those three words exactly.

The Friday Club

The computer club at Ashley Manor runs on Fridays. It has run for roughly twenty years. It is open to children from year three upwards, and some weeks thirty or forty students come. Some weeks it is ten or fifteen, depending on what else is on. But the most enthusiastic ones are always there.

When the DAIGON competition came along, Ed did not need to build a programme from scratch. He had twenty years of Minecraft history, a room of twenty-four desktop PCs, and Adam, the network manager whose own love of Minecraft helped drive the whole thing.

"Minecraft, fortunately, runs on pretty much anything," Ed says. The infrastructure was already there. The only real investment was the Minecraft Education licences, and those were not significant.

There was no resistance from the school. People asked what it was. Some had heard of it. But nobody said no.

"Absolutely none," Ed says. "Everybody regarded it as an absolutely brilliant thing to do."

The Team of Six

The team that formed around the competition was not the team Ed might have predicted.

They opened it to Year sixes. Enough children came forward to put a team together. After a couple of weeks, they settled on the team. The six who are going to Malta are the same six who have been together from the beginning.

Two of them are girls. Some of the boys are outstanding rugby players and footballers. The others are children who have never particularly enjoyed sport and have rarely competed in that way before.

"You wouldn't expect those children to necessarily be close friends," Ed says. "But this has brought them together."

Children who would not have spent time together in any other context now have something they share. The competition created a team that the ordinary rhythms of school life would never have assembled.

Learning as They Went

The team had never played Minecraft Capture the Flag before signing up to the competition. No one at Ashley Manor had. Ed was learning alongside them.

Once they had access to the game, they spent a couple of sessions finding out how it worked. And then, very quickly, the children took over.

"It was very much led by them," Ed says.

They worked out who should defend and who should attack. After every match, they sat down and reviewed it: what went well, what did not, what they would do differently next time. Nobody told them to do this. It is just what they did.

The sessions are loud. Ed smiles when he says it. There is conversation happening across the room, strategies being called out, reactions to what is happening on screen. Some children put headphones on and block it out. Others are in constant motion.

"They love it," Ed says. "It just runs itself when the children come in."

York

The ISA qualifying competition took the team to York for the national finals. It was their first time playing in person, in a room with other schools, with stakes that suddenly felt very real. Ashley Manor had made t-shirts. The trip was an event.

Ed has a video of the last thirty seconds of the final game. He keeps it.

The team won. And in those last few moments, in the noise and the celebration, something shifted. They had an inkling, Ed says, that Malta might actually be possible. That what they had started as an experiment had brought them somewhere none of them expected to be.

"Some of those children haven't really competed in sport very much before," Ed says. "And if they have, it might not be something they particularly enjoyed. Whereas you've got esports, and it's something they absolutely love."

What Malta Means

The six children going to Malta are now in Year seven. Some of them have moved to St Edward's. Some are at other schools entirely. They are no longer in the same building every day. But they are still a team.

"They're kind of in a position where they're coming back together to do something special that they've worked very hard to get to," Ed says.

Malta is a place none of them have been. They do not know what it will look like or exactly how the competition will run. There is some apprehension, Ed admits. But mostly there is excitement, and pride.

"They're very proud that they've got there in the first place," he says.

"The competition means a lot to me, I've played Minecraft growing up and being in a competition of this scale is like a fire re-igniting in my heart. I'm so happy to be part of this team, we have all worked so hard to get here!"

— Team Captain, Ashley Manor Preparatory School

The ambition is not complicated. Win a game or two. Do as well as they can. But more than any result, it is about finishing what they started together, as a team that was assembled by chance and held together by something none of them could quite have anticipated.

What Comes Next

Ed has already registered a team for next year's competition. He is hoping to get St Edward's involved in Rocket League. The younger children at Ashley Manor, years three and four, are already watching what the older students have built, already counting the years until they are old enough to be part of it.

"They're all very excited about becoming old enough to be part of it," Ed says.

For a small school, that kind of enthusiasm sustains itself. As long as children want to do it, they will find a way to make it run.

What Ed Wants You to Know

At the end of the call, Ed was asked the question that closes every profile in this series: when someone reads this profile and thinks about Ashley Manor for the first time, what do you want them to feel?

He came back to the thing he keeps coming back to throughout the conversation.

"It's about inclusivity. It's about finding what each child is interested in and running with it."

Ashley Manor is a small school. It does not have enormous budgets or sprawling facilities. What it has is the knowledge of its children, the willingness to try things, and the conviction that every student deserves to find something that is theirs.

"Esports has given our pupils an exciting opportunity to develop their communication, strategic thinking and teamwork. From the online rounds to the ISA finals in York, which were an incredible experience, the team has shown real dedication and support for one another. Qualifying for the School Esports World Championships in Malta is a wonderful next step. We are grateful to DAIGON for creating opportunities like this and incredibly proud to see our team representing Ashley Manor on an international stage."

— Ed Parkin, Deputy Head, Ashley Manor Preparatory School

An email arrived. A computer club that had been running for twenty years suddenly had a competition to aim at. A group of unlikely friends found each other around a game they already loved.

Nobody planned it. It just worked.

Ashley Manor Preparatory School competes in Minecraft Capture the Flag at the School Esports World Championships 2026, Malta, November 18 to 23. Ashley Manor qualified through the ISA DAIGON Esports Competition.