Across Blackheath High School, we are always looking for ways to create leadership opportunities for girls. The GDST Girls’ Futures Report highlights that girls’ attitudes to leadership are complex and multidimensional “and not necessarily reliant on traditional measures such as salary, prestige or power...Whilst girls hold strong ambitions and passions about what they want to achieve, they don’t necessarily want to lead in a traditional ‘from the front’ way, but...want to bring more collaborative and open traits to leadership.” 

From the first day girls join our Senior School, we begin  a pathway of leadership opportunities, building a range of skills from those more traditionally associated with being a leader - responsibility, ambition, passion, confidence; to the traits that will drive more women into leadership roles in future - empathy, collaboration, empowerment. Crucially, we ensure that these qualities complement, rather than compromise, their ambition and ability to create meaningful change. 

In Year 7, girls begin their journey with our Civil Discourse enrichment course, designed to instil confidence and help girls find their voices in a loud, disruptive, unequal world. Read more about this and hear our lesson live on BBC Radio London.

If your daughter has been selected to act as an ambassador, we have leadership in mind. Whether girls are being challenged to talk confidently and positively about their school on tours, answer audience questions ‘off the cuff’ as part of a Head’s Q&A panel, act as role models for younger students or support their teachers at taster events, they are learning incredibly important skills along the way. 

Our Year 11 Enrichment Programme develops leadership through community engagement, supporting students in building human connections with the world around them. Students batch-cook for foodbanks; they write and perform storytelling adventures for our Classics for Kids activity; they spend afternoons reading the newspaper and playing board games with older people from local care homes. These are not skills you would see on The Apprentice – and yet, they sit at the very heart of what we understand as authentic, compassionate leadership. 

By Sixth Form, we are preparing girls to leave Blackheath High as the changemakers of the future. Year 12 undertake SHINE, where they plan and deliver STEM-themed sessions to Year 5 students from the Brindishe schools, developing leadership and collaboration skills; Year 13 run their own societies, form our inspiring Head Student and Prefect Teams and Sixth Formers also take part in GDST LEAD, an innovative entrepreneurship programme.  

Read more about our whole-school approach to student leadership.