Norwich High School for Girls

Norwich High is worth a look for parents who want their daughter to have space in the week for things that aren't marked or measured. In 2024, it rebuilt the timetable to create an extra Friday period and gave it to every girl in Years 7 to 9 for cookery, forest school and financial awareness, with no assessment attached. It is an independent day school for girls from three to eighteen, part of the Girls' Day School Trust, on a single fourteen-acre campus on Newmarket Road in central Norwich.

It opened on Monday 22 February 1875 with sixty-one girls in Churchman House on St Giles, the first school the Trust founded outside London. From 1876 it spent over fifty years in the Assembly House, the Georgian building in the middle of Norwich that families now go to for concerts, before buying Eaton Grove on Newmarket Road in 1933. That house is a listed Regency villa with a cupola and a weather vane on the roof, and once a year the school opens it, its serpentine garden wall and its own archives to anyone who wants to walk in.

The four houses are named after Norfolk women, Edith Cavell, Elizabeth Fry, Julian of Norwich and Harriet Martineau, and run vertically from the nursery to the upper sixth, so a Year 7 shares a house with three-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds. Girls can be in from half past seven for breakfast, and the library is supervised until six. Phones go in lockers all day. Entry at eleven is an online test, a creative writing paper, a group activity and an interview, into a year of three forms of about twenty-two. Pupils told the Good Schools Guide, 'We know the staff and they know us.' It suits a girl who wants to be known by name in a school that still has some scale to it.