Benenden School

Benenden School was founded in 1923 by three former teachers from Wycombe Abbey — Helen Hindle Sheldon, Charlotte Bird and Florence Frank — as a Church of England girls' boarding school in the Kentish village of Benenden. The school sits today on a 240-acre rural campus at Hemsted Park — a Grade II listed Victorian country house — and is one of the very few remaining substantially full-boarding girls' schools in the United Kingdom. Around 550 girls ages 11-18, all boarders, are educated. The Headmistress is Samantha Price.

Benenden's most internationally famous alumna is HRH The Princess Royal — Princess Anne, the daughter of Queen Elizabeth II and the only daughter of Prince Philip — who attended Benenden from 1963 to 1968 as the first British royal princess to be sent to a regular boarding school. Princess Anne went on to compete for Great Britain in three-day-eventing at the 1976 Montreal Olympics (the only British royal to have competed in an Olympic Games) and has served for fifty years as the most active member of the Royal Family by official engagement count, becoming Princess Royal in 1987.

Baroness Karren Brady CBE — the businesswoman who, as Chief Executive of Birmingham City Football Club in the 1990s, became the most prominent female executive in English professional football, now Vice-Chairman of West Ham United and business partner of Sir Alan Sugar on the BBC's The Apprentice — was a Benenden girl. The school operates a substantial bursary programme.