Queen's Gate School

Queen’s Gate is a day school for girls aged 4 to 18 located in South Kensington, on the edge of the capital’s educational and cultural heartland. With around 500 pupils in total, we are a close knit, multinational community where every girl can be known as an individual. Our mission is for each pupil to reach – and exceed – her own personal potential. As one Year 7 recently commented, in our smaller school, she has found “room to blossom”

We are justly proud of our academic success, achieving far beyond the baseline potential of our relatively broad intake; indeed, in 2022 our value-added scores (the measure of how far our girls achieved above their baseline predictions) were the fourth-highest in the country. Our small class sizes allow for individualised attention and plenty of additional support outside of lessons. We provide a wide range of academic subjects across both the Junior and Senior Schools, with girls at A Level able to select from 28 possible subjects. While most of the Junior School choose to remain at Queen’s Gate for their secondary education, we also have girls successfully apply to a range of other London day schools, and a number of boarding settings. Sixth Form pupils leave us to universities across the UK, including Oxford and Cambridge, and some travel further afar to institutions in North American and Canada.

Alongside this we offer a plethora of co-curricular activities. Our sport in particular, goes far beyond what is often assumed given our location, as we are able to take advantage of the wealth of high-quality facilities in the surrounding area. We boast of a number of pupils competing at international level in their chosen specialisms; indeed, our individual focus means we are well-suited to pupils such as this, who often need flexibility in order to attend training and competitions. We also have girls in the National Youth Orchestra and the National Youth Theatre, demonstrating the way we nurture talent in all fields.

We are an outward-looking school, with a deep-rooted commitment to charity. We don’t just collect goods for our local foodbank; our girls help transport them there, and then spend time loading shelves and preparing packages. Others host weekly visitors from Age UK for lunch or travel to local primary schools to provide support with reading and other activities. We regularly host visiting speakers, from an organisation supporting those who are homeless explaining their work for our Junior School, to an advertising executive letting the Senior girls into the secrets of the trade. At all such events, our girls are ready with further questions, keen to learn more about the world outside our walls.

Most of all though, what our pupils, staff and parents speak of is our warm, light-hearted atmosphere, of the opportunity to be your true self, of the vibrant creativity buzzing away inside our walls, and of the genuine contentment that pervades our community. We believe that happy girls are the most likely to overachieve, that confident girls will be those who feel safest to reach outside their comfort zone, and that joyful girls will be most able to thrive, both during their time with us, and into their adult lives.