South Hampstead High School GDST

South Hampstead High School was founded in 1876 as one of the very first schools of the Girls' Day School Company (now the Girls' Day School Trust, GDST) — the Victorian charitable federation founded in 1872 to provide academically rigorous day-school education for girls at a time when this was almost completely unavailable. South Hampstead today is one of 25 GDST schools across the UK and one of the most academically selective. The school is girls-only, ages 4-18, with around 954 pupils. The Headmistress is Victoria Bingham.

The school is a member of the GSA and the GDST and is inspected by the ISI. The Senior School is in South Hampstead, north-west London, in a purpose-built modern building completed in 2013 on Maresfield Gardens; the Junior School is on a separate site nearby. A-Level results place South Hampstead consistently in the top quintile of London girls' independent schools by Oxbridge offer numbers.

The school's most internationally famous alumna is Helena Bonham Carter CBE — twice Oscar-nominated, the BAFTA-winning star of A Room with a View, The King's Speech (Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother), Fight Club, the Harry Potter films (Bellatrix Lestrange) and The Crown (Princess Margaret). Bonham Carter is one of the defining English screen actresses of her generation. The BAFTA-winning actress Tamsin Greig — Black Books, Episodes, Friday Night Dinner — was at South Hampstead. The novelist Esther Freud — Hideous Kinky and other novels, and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud — was a pupil.

In technology and philanthropy, Dame Stephanie Shirley CH — the Vienna-born refugee-Kindertransport child who founded the British software-engineering pioneer F International (later Xansa) in 1962 and went on to become one of Britain's most generous philanthropists, donating over £150 million primarily for autism research — was educated at South Hampstead. In anti-apartheid history, Helen Joseph — one of the founders of the South African Federation of South African Women and one of the first women charged under the apartheid regime's Suppression of Communism Act — was an Old Hampsteadian.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the GDST charitable foundation.