Channing School

Channing School was founded in 1885 by the sisters Emily and Matilda Sharpe alongside the Reverend Robert Spears, all Unitarians, in north London. The school takes its name from William Ellery Channing — the American Unitarian theologian whose On the Education of the Poor and other writings shaped nineteenth-century progressive education in the United States and Britain. Channing's specifically Unitarian foundation places it among a small group of English independent schools that emerged from non-Trinitarian Christian traditions outside the Anglican mainstream. The school is girls-only, ages 4-18, and is a member of the GSA. The Headmistress is Lindsey Hughes.

Channing occupies a Highgate Hill site in the London Borough of Haringey, directly above Highgate Cemetery (where the Sharpe sisters and Karl Marx are buried) and adjacent to Hampstead Heath. The Junior School operates from Fairseat, the former home of Sir Sydney Waterlow Bt — the Victorian philanthropist and politician who donated the adjoining Waterlow Park to the public as a "garden for the garden less." Notable past teachers at the school include the physicist Gladys Mackenzie, who taught at Channing before her academic career.

Channing's pastoral system divides girls into four houses named after the school's founding figures and benefactors: Sharpe (after the founder sisters), Spears (after Rev. Robert Spears), Waterlow (after Sir Sydney Waterlow) and Goodwin (after a prominent Highgate family). The 2015 ISI inspection awarded Channing the highest possible judgement in every category inspected.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Channing Foundation, intended to maintain the Sharpes' 1885 Unitarian-liberal foundation principle of educational access for girls regardless of family means.