North London Collegiate School

North London Collegiate School (NLCS) was founded in 1850 by Frances Mary Buss, the daughter of a London bookseller, in her family home at 46 Camden Street in north London. Buss was a pioneer of girls' education in Victorian England: at a time when no English school provided girls with the kind of academic education available to their brothers at the great public schools, Buss set out to demonstrate that girls could thrive at the same intellectual standard. The school originally took fees from those families who could afford them and provided free places for those who could not. Buss campaigned alongside her contemporary Dorothea Beale (Principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College) for women's access to university examinations, and her work contributed directly to the establishment of Girton College, Cambridge (1869) and Newnham College, Cambridge (1871) — the first Cambridge colleges to admit women. The contemporary verse "Miss Buss and Miss Beale / Cupid's darts do not feel" captured her formidable public image.

NLCS today is girls-only in its UK campus, educating around 1,066 pupils aged 4-18 on a 30-acre site at Canons, Edgware, in north-west London. The school is a member of the GSA. The Headmistress, since 2017, is Vicky Bingham. The school has expanded internationally with co-educational sister campuses at NLCS Jeju (South Korea, opened 2011) and NLCS Dubai (opened 2017); these international campuses are co-educational while the UK foundation remains girls-only.

NLCS is consistently the strongest UK girls' school by Oxbridge offer numbers — typically the highest girls'-school Oxbridge intake of any school in any given year — and is regularly cited as a defining model of academic girls' education globally. Sciences and mathematics are particular strengths; the school produces regular UK Mathematical Olympiad and Physics Olympiad qualifiers.

The Old Girls' alumni list runs through the very top of British public life. In intelligence: Dame Stella Rimington, who served as Director General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996 (the first woman to hold the post). In fashion and publishing: Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of US Vogue since 1988 and Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast — perhaps the most influential figure in global fashion. In politics: Diane Abbott MP, the former Shadow Home Secretary and the first black woman to be elected to the House of Commons (1987). In literature: the Booker Prize-winning novelist Andrea Levy (Small Island); the popular novelist Susan Howatch; and Joan Riley. In broadcasting: Esther Rantzen CBE, of BBC's That's Life! In law: Dame Eleanor Sharpston QC, former Advocate General of the European Court of Justice. NLCS operates a substantial bursary programme via the Frances Mary Buss Foundation.