Oxford High School

If your daughter is academic and you are anywhere near Oxford, this is the school she will already have heard of. Oxford High is an independent day school for girls, part of the Girls' Day School Trust, and the oldest girls' school in the city. It is selective, and the Good Schools Guide counts about forty-five places at eleven for girls coming from outside, who 'sit a battery of tests'. In practice that is one admissions day in November: an online assessment in maths, English and reasoning, a written English paper, then an interview.

It opened on 3 November 1875 with twenty-nine girls and three teachers, in the Judge's Lodgings on St Giles, where pupils were given holidays whenever the judges came to town. It moved into a purpose-built school on the Banbury Road designed by Sir Thomas Graham Jackson, the architect of much of late Victorian Oxford, and took the motto Ad Lucem and a sunflower as its badge in 1880. Since the 1950s it has been on Belbroughton Road in north Oxford, the leafy street John Betjeman opened a poem about. The junior and pre-prep schools are a few minutes away on their own sites.

Two admirable traditions of note: The school magazine has been written and edited by the girls continuously since 1879, stopping only for wartime paper shortages, and the 1918 edition is stoical about influenza having cancelled the school's Armistice celebrations. And the school keeps bees. The 1942 magazine reported the hives producing over a hundred pounds of honey 'in a laudable spirit of service', and the Trust now gives the school beacon status for bee-keeping, with two extractions in a good summer, one light and citrusy and one more floral. Eight languages are taught, modern and classical. It suits a girl who is curious about more than her marks.