Northwood College for Girls

For a hard-working, ambitious girl who would value warm pastoral care as much as academic challenge, Northwood College for Girls is the kind of school that earns loyal parents. The Good Schools Guide sums it up as a down-to-earth, friendly school with strong teaching, where care for the individual is built into daily life alongside a purposeful, ambitious culture. The reviewers describe go-getting girls who want to make a difference, and a parent body that values how aware of the wider world their daughters become; the pupil community is diverse, and parents report a notable absence of cliques.

This is an independent day school in north-west London, taking girls from nursery through to the sixth form. It was founded in 1878 near Euston by the headmistress Catherine Buchan-Smith, who moved the school out to Northwood fifteen years later, and it joined the Girls' Day School Trust in 2014. Her motto, that education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life, still sits at the centre of how the school describes itself. The all-through setting shows in the facilities, including a 25-metre indoor pool where even the youngest pupils have weekly lessons, a sports hall with a climbing wall, and a performing arts centre with its own drama studio and recital hall.

Led since 2021 by headmistress Mrs Rebecca Brown, an Oxford historian by training, Northwood suits a girl who might join at one of several entry points and who wants to be stretched and looked after in equal measure as she grows up.