St Helen's School

St Helen's School was founded in 1899 by May Roland Brown in Northwood, Middlesex (now the London Borough of Hillingdon), as a Church of England girls' school. The school takes its name from St Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine and patron of the original Northwood parish church. From its 1899 foundation the school has occupied the present Eastbury Road site, expanded over the twentieth century into a substantial campus on the edge of the Northwood town centre. St Helen's today is girls-only and educates around 1,127 pupils aged 3-18 across an integrated Pre-Prep, Prep, Senior School and Sixth Form. The Headmistress is Alice Lucas.

The school is a member of the GSA and ISI. Its houses are named after pioneering women whose lives the school holds up as examples: Mary Seacole (Crimean War nurse), Frida Kahlo, the Brontë sisters and Rosalind Franklin. A-Level performance places St Helen's consistently in the top quintile of north-west London girls' independent schools by Oxbridge offer numbers.

The school's modern alumnae list runs deep in broadcasting, acting and senior public service. Patricia Hodge OBE — the BAFTA-nominated actress whose career spans Howard's Way, Miranda (where she played Penny), The Cleaner and decades of West End theatre — was a St Helen's pupil in the 1950s. Joan Eardley, one of the most original Scottish painters of the twentieth century (the Glasgow tenement children and the Catterline coastal landscapes), attended in the 1920s. In Whitehall and the senior civil service: Dame Barbara Mills DBE, who served as Director of Public Prosecutions from 1992 to 1998 (the first woman in the role); Dame Ingrid Roscoe DBE, the art historian and former Lord-Lieutenant of West Yorkshire; Penny Johnson, the long-serving Director of the Government Art Collection.

In broadcasting: Penny Marshall, the BBC journalist whose 1992 reporting from the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia first exposed Serbian internment of Bosnian Muslims; the late Magenta Devine, of BBC's Reportage and The Word; and the former BBC News correspondent Luisa Baldini. In business: Paula Nickolds, former Managing Director of John Lewis. In sport: the Commonwealth Games weightlifting silver medallist Jessica Gordon Brown. The school operates a substantial bursary programme.