St Paul's Girls' School

St Paul's Girls' School was founded in 1904 by the Worshipful Company of Mercers — one of the twelve Great Livery Companies of London and the trustee of the original St Paul's School for boys (founded 1509 by John Colet, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral). The Girls' School was founded as part of the same Mercers' charitable foundation but as a separate institution, sharing the founding intent of Colet's 1509 grammar school but providing the same education for girls. The school operates today on a 5-acre campus at Brook Green, Hammersmith, west London. The High Mistress is Sarah Fletcher.

St Paul's Girls' is a day school only — boarding has never been offered — and is girls-only ages 11-18 with around 824 pupils. The school is governed by the Worshipful Company of Mercers and is a member of the GSA. St Paul's Girls' is consistently ranked among the very top three UK girls' schools by A-Level results and Oxbridge offer rate, and is among the very most academically selective girls' schools in the country.

The school's most internationally significant historical association is with the English composer Gustav Holst, who served as Director of Music at the school from 1905 to 1934. Holst composed his orchestral suite The Planets — among the most performed and recorded orchestral works in the English-language classical repertoire — while in post at the school, and the suite's Mars: the Bringer of War and Jupiter: the Bringer of Jollity were first sketched at the school music room. The Holst music suite at the school is preserved as a museum. Holst's daughter Imogen Holst CBE — herself a significant composer and Benjamin Britten's principal long-serving collaborator at Aldeburgh — was a pupil at the school in the 1920s.

The Turner Prize-winning artist Dame Rachel Whiteread — whose 1993 sculpture House (a concrete cast of the interior of a demolished East End terraced house) won her the Turner Prize and remains one of the iconic British art works of the late twentieth century — was a Pauline. The historian Lady Antonia Fraser CH DBE — Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell, the Pinter Letters, and the widow of Harold Pinter — was educated at St Paul's. The novelist Rachel Cusk — Outline, Aftermath, Second Place — is a Pauline. Carol Vorderman MBE, the Countdown mathematics and broadcasting personality, was at the school. The actress Eleanor Bron — Help! (1965, opposite The Beatles), Bedazzled and the canonical role of Lady Margaret Bligh in the BBC's 1990s Mapp and Lucia — was a Pauline.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the St Paul's Girls' School Foundation.