St. Albans High School for Girls

If your daughter is bright and does best when an assessment feels like an ordinary day rather than a big occasion, this is how St Albans High School for Girls approaches it: breaks, lunch, and practice questions handed out on the spot. The parents' meeting is explicitly no part of her assessment. St Albans High School for Girls is an independent day school for four to eighteen, selective at every entry point, and entry at eleven plus is the ISEB pre-test followed by an interview in January.

It is two places, not one. The senior school is in the middle of St Albans on Townsend Avenue, in the building it put up for itself in 1908 and still uses at the heart of the campus. The prep moved out in 2003 to Wheathampstead House, eighteen acres of fields and woodland in a village a few miles north. The school was founded on 2 May 1889, after the Rector of the Abbey pushed for a girls' school in a city that had nothing for girls past the age of twelve, and the first pupil on the register was his own daughter.

The four houses are named after figures from the city: a fifteenth-century prioress of Sopwell remembered for her hawking, a thirteenth-century monk chronicler, the author of a medieval book of travels, and Francis Bacon. It is still a Church of England school and says it welcomes families of all faiths or none. One thing worth knowing at dinner: in 1950 the school took boys into one of its houses, and an eight-year-old Stephen Hawking was one of them. It suits a girl who wants pace and will enjoy it.