Blackheath High School

If you are looking for a small girls' school in south east London, Blackheath High has been doing exactly that in the same corner of it since 1880. It is an independent day school for girls from three to eighteen, part of the Girls' Day School Trust, on two sites a short walk apart. The junior school sits in the middle of Blackheath village and the senior school is on Vanbrugh Park, at the edge of Greenwich Park. Girls join Year 7 after three written papers in November of Year 6 and an interview in January.

It opened on 7 January 1880 as the Trust's first purpose-built school, inaugurated by Princess Louise and built for three hundred girls. The first pupil on the register, Margaret Robertson, enrolled twelve days later alongside sixty-seven others. During the war the school was evacuated to Tunbridge Wells and spent a few years under the double-barrelled name Blackheath and Tunbridge Wells High School while the army held its building. The senior school moved out to Vanbrugh Park in 1994, which means today's seven-year-olds are taught in the Victorian building the school started in.

The Good Schools Guide, which counts a little over four hundred girls in the senior school, says most of them 'walk, cycle or scoot their way in', and found the girls it met 'curious, polite, open-minded and balanced'. A new sixth former told it, 'I thought it was going to be really difficult changing school but everybody's so nice.' Girls keep the same house, Meridian, Morden, Paragon or Vanbrugh, from the day they arrive to the day they leave. It suits a girl who would rather be known by name in a small school than disappear pleasantly into a large one.