Forest School, London

Forest School is a co-educational independent day school in Walthamstow, east London, founded in 1834 by William Taylor Copeland and a group of local dignitaries. The earliest buildings on the site, which sit at the edge of Epping Forest, date from the eighteenth century, when the land belonged to a brick-maker named Thomas Skingle; the present school occupies a large campus of Grade II listed Georgian and Victorian terraced buildings around what is still called "The Field." The school educates around 1,430 pupils aged 4-18, split roughly equally between boys and girls.

Forest operates the Diamond Model of co-education: boys and girls are taught in separate classes from Year 7 to Year 11, but share the same campus, sixth form and extra-curricular programme. The school has fourteen houses with vivid traditional names — Bishops, Copelands, Doctors, Guys, Jowett's, Squires — that thread through pastoral and competitive life. It is a member of the HMC, the GSA and IAPS, an unusually wide constellation of senior associations.

The school's modern reputation is built largely on the strength of its arts and drama programmes. Recent acting alumni include Paapa Essiedu (BAFTA-nominated for I May Destroy You), Ella Purnell (Fallout, Yellowjackets), Nicola Walker (Spooks, Unforgotten, The Split), Corey Mylchreest (My Oxford Year, Queen Charlotte) and Adam Woodyatt, who has played Ian Beale in EastEnders since 1985 — the longest continuous role in British soap. The film director Peter Greenaway and the writer Sharat Sardana (Goodness Gracious Me) also studied at Forest. Outside the arts, alumni include the Battle of Britain fighter pilot Geoffrey Wellum, author of the classic memoir First Light; the polar explorer Edward L. Atkinson, who served as surgeon on Scott's Terra Nova Expedition (his sledge flag still hangs in the dining hall); and Ersin Tatar, current President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

The Warden is Claire Tao, the school's first female head, in post since 2024. Forest's combination of academic breadth, strong creative arts and 60-acre semi-rural campus in east London makes it one of the most distinctive Diamond Model schools inside the M25.