Wimbledon High School GDST

Wimbledon High School (WHS) was founded in 1880 by the Girls' Public Day School Trust — the Victorian charitable initiative that established 26 girls' schools across England as the female equivalent of the great public schools — and opened on 9 November 1880 at 74 Wimbledon Hill Road with twelve students and Miss Edith Hastings as Headmistress. The school is part of the modern Girls' Day School Trust (GDST), a national charity that operates 26 schools across England and Wales with 19,500 pupils and 3,500 staff. Wimbledon High educates around 1,000 girls aged 4-18 across the Junior School and Senior School, on a campus that has expanded to include several buildings along Mansel Road and Wimbledon Hill Road. The Headmistress is Fionnuala Kennedy.

Wimbledon High is a member of the GSA and the GDST. The school's A-Level performance places it consistently in the top tier of London girls' independent day schools by Oxbridge offer numbers. Notable past teachers at the school include the educational reformer Nellie Dale, who developed at Wimbledon one of the first systematic phonics-based reading programmes for British schools in the late nineteenth century; the suffragist socialist writer Ada Wallas; and the wartime headmistress Ethel Gavin, who led the school through the First World War.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Girls' Day School Trust, intended to maintain the GDST's foundation principle of providing the highest standards of girls' education regardless of family means. The GDST's national bursary fund — one of the largest in UK education — supports a significant proportion of WHS pupils each year.