Headington Rye Oxford

Headington School was founded in 1915 by a group of Evangelical Christians who wanted to provide "a sound education for girls to fit them for the demands and opportunities likely to arise after the war." The school began with ten boarding and eight day girls at Headington Lodge on Osler Road in east Oxford, and expanded steadily through the inter-war and post-war decades into a major GSA day and boarding school. In 2025 Headington merged with the neighbouring Rye St Antony School (founded 1930) to form Headington Rye Oxford, an enlarged single-school foundation. The combined school is girls-only and educates around 1,150 pupils aged 3-18. The Headmistress is Caroline Jordan.

The school is a member of the GSA, the BSA and ISI. It is set in east Oxford, directly adjacent to the University of Oxford, with the Headington Lodge buildings still in active use alongside more recent academic and boarding facilities. The school offers both A-Levels and the International Baccalaureate Diploma in the sixth form. Geographic proximity to Oxford produces a strong feeder relationship: a substantial portion of each sixth-form cohort wins offers to Oxford colleges each year, with similar strength in Cambridge admissions.

Headington's most internationally famous alumna is the former Prime Minister Theresa May, Baroness May of Maidenhead, who attended Headington in the 1970s on a bursary; she went on to read geography at St Hugh's College, Oxford, served as Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, and as Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019. The school's modern sporting reputation rests on its rowing programme, which is consistently among the strongest girls' school rowing programmes in the UK; Headington alumna Helen Glover MBE went on to become double Olympic gold medallist in coxless pairs (London 2012 and Rio 2016).

The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to honour the 1915 Evangelical-Christian foundation principle of educational access regardless of family means.