Oxford High School GDST

Oxford High School was founded in 1875 as one of the Girls' Public Day School Trust (now GDST) foundations, providing academically rigorous day-school education for the daughters of Oxford University dons and Oxford professional families. The school operates today on a central Oxford campus and educates around 789 pupils ages 3-18. The Headmistress is Helen Whyte. The school is a member of the GSA and the GDST and is inspected by the ISI.

The school's geographic position in central Oxford — immediately adjacent to the University of Oxford — produces a particularly strong Oxford feeder relationship. A-Level results place Oxford High consistently in the top five UK girls' independent schools by Oxbridge offer rate.

The school's most internationally significant alumna is Dame Iris Murdoch DBE — the Anglo-Irish philosopher and novelist whose 26 novels (The Sea, The Sea won the 1978 Man Booker Prize; The Bell, Under the Net, The Black Prince, The Good Apprentice) made her among the most important post-war English novelists, and whose philosophical work as a leading figure of the Oxford ordinary-language school placed her at the heart of mid-twentieth-century British analytical philosophy. Murdoch attended the school in the 1930s. The primatologist Dame Jane Goodall DBE — founder of modern chimpanzee field research at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania from 1960, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, and the leading global advocate for ape conservation for sixty years — was an Oxford High girl.

The school is governed by the Girls' Day School Trust and operates a substantial bursary programme via the GDST charitable foundation, intended to maintain the founding Victorian principle of educational access for academically able girls regardless of family means.