Tatler Schools Guide 2023

South Hampstead is featured in the Tatler Schools Guide, their annual review of the top schools in the UK.

‘As one of the first Girls’ Day School Trust schools to open in 1876, South Hampstead has intrepid women at its origins – and has kept them at its heart ever since. SHHS pupils are surrounded by female trailblazers from day one, with ‘brilliant’ and ‘feminist’ head Vicky Bingham leading by example, and ‘amazing’ staff at the top of their fields – even the yoga teacher is a Cambridge graduate. Inspirational guest speakers have included a former MI5 director general, and Christina Ohuruogo, GB’s most decorated female track athlete, who presented medals at last year’s sports day. Entry to SHHS is highly competitive, with about 10 applications per place and rigorous exams. According to the head of admissions, prospective pupils should be ‘receptive and engaging with a bit of spark, and have got their own thing’. (Whatever that ‘thing’ may be, it will be ‘nurtured to the fullest extent’.) Beyond consistently stellar results – 95% of last year’s A Levels were A*/A – girls here forge success in everything they do. In the past year alone, SHHS’s physicists won a national safe-cracking contest, a Sixth Former took top prize in the RSA’s Pupil Design Awards for a project challenging systemic racism – and a group of scientists was shortlisted in a national inventors’ competition.’

The review featured in the ‘Tatler Schools Guide 2023: the top prep and public schools in the UK’, published in conjunction with the October 2022 edition of Tatler.