Withington Girls' School

Withington Girls' School was founded in 1890 in the Manchester suburb of Fallowfield as one of the leading academic girls' day schools of the North West. The school operates today on a single Fallowfield site in south Manchester. The school is girls-only ages 7-18 with around 756 pupils. The Headmistress is Sarah Haslam. The school is a member of the GSA and is inspected by the ISI.

Withington is consistently ranked among the very top three UK girls' schools by A-Level results and Oxbridge offer rate — often the highest-performing non-London girls' independent school in the country. The school maintains a particularly strong sciences, mathematics and medical-schools pipeline.

The school's most internationally significant alumna is Dame Cicely Saunders OM — the nurse, social worker and physician who founded the modern hospice movement with the opening of St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham in 1967 and who pioneered the development of palliative care as a recognised medical speciality. Saunders's work on "total pain" — the conceptualisation of the dying patient's experience as combining physical, psychological, social and spiritual dimensions — transformed the care of the terminally ill across the world; the modern hospice movement is among the most significant medical-care reforms of the late twentieth century. Saunders attended Withington from 1932 to 1937.

Dame Athene Donald DBE — Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge experimental physicist whose work on soft-matter physics has made her one of the leading materials scientists of her generation — was a Withington girl. The novelist Sarah Hall — Haweswater (2002), How to Paint a Dead Man (2009 Man Booker shortlist) and Burntcoat — is an Old Withingtonian.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Withington Foundation.