Dame Allan's School

If you looked at Dame Allan's a year or two ago and the single-sex teaching wasn't for you, look again. The school ran separate boys' and girls' schools through the middle years for about forty years and has now brought them together: from September 2026 Years 7 to 10 are taught co-educationally, with Year 11 staying single-sex until that group has finished its GCSEs. It is an independent day school in Newcastle upon Tyne for three to eighteen, with the junior school at Spital Tongues and the senior school and sixth form two miles west in Fenham.

It goes back to 1705, when Dame Eleanor Allan, a goldsmith's daughter and a tobacco merchant's widow, made a deed of gift to educate forty poor boys and twenty poor girls from two Newcastle parishes, funded by the income from a farm at Wallsend. Girls were in the founding gift rather than added later. The schools moved around the city for two centuries, picking up one of Newcastle's first physics laboratories on the way, and arrived in Fenham in 1935.

A child joining Year 7 changes site as well as school, into senior classes of about twenty-four. There are nearly two hundred clubs a week, and the school says pupils who cannot find one they want are helped to start it. Pastoral care includes a room called the Snug, opened in 2022, for a child who needs somewhere quiet, and a set of therapy dogs. The Good Schools Guide found 'no arrogance or entitlement among students at Dame Allan's, just pride in their school and gratitude for their opportunities', and one parent called it 'the least private of private schools'. It suits a child who wants a school with some age to it and no side.