I always thought it was a shame Pratchett never wrote that Assassins Guild book series. You can see bits of it as an idea in Pyramids; but alas a take down of the British boarding school system was not to be.

As for the worse worst witch; not my thing, never read them. Too busy with HHGTTG.

E. Nesbit wrote books with magic in them, about a century before Rowling, and they couldn't be more different. They were, and still are, fun to read. I read some of them to my kids and they enjoyed them. Her magic systems weren't necessarily "hard" in the modern sense of being highly technically constrained, but she did have a "hard" constraint that magic doesn't give you a free pass to act immorally, and that it would be no free lunch. She was really a pioneer in this, moving away from "magic allows you to transcend morality" easy-button Victorian fantasies that Rowling seems to have embraced in spirit.

Nesbit's books were so good that Edward Eager, about half a century later, lamented that there couldn't be any more of her books, and basically wrote books that E. Nesbit might have written if she were writing in America in the middle of the 20th century. And yes, my children enjoyed me reading from Eager as well.