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T e Modern Family Education & Schooling


North London Collegiate School – equipping girls to lead


Promotional Content • Saturday 30th August 2025


“A high fl ying school for super bright,


confi dent, high achieving and indefatigable girls.” Good Schools Guide 2025 Join a ‘School in Action’ morning to discover what makes NLCS so special.


Two pioneering programmes at one of the UK’s leading independent girls’ day schools, North London Collegiate School (NLCS), are helping students move beyond confi dence, giving them the skills to think boldly, speak clearly and act with intent. NLCS believes that education


should do more than prepare students for exams. It knows that academic rigour matters, but feels an ambitious education must also prepare young people to navigate and shape a world that can be fast moving, interconnect- ed and sometimes unequal. T is year, the school is launching


two new initiatives — Raising Voices and Surge — that refl ect this ethos. Both are designed to equip students with more than knowledge. T ey help cultivate something even hard- er to teach: the ability to think inde- pendently, communicate clearly and lead with purpose.


Research shows that while girls


consistently outperform boys in liter- acy, they are still less likely to speak up in class or volunteer for public speaking, an imbalance that often follows them into adulthood1


. T is


isn’t a question of ability, but of social conditioning and learned inhibition. Raising Voices, the school’s new oracy programme, was developed to change that trajectory for its students. T rough stand-up comedy work-


shops, debates, speeches and story- telling, Raising Voices embeds oppor- tunities for spoken expression across school life — from Year 7 to the Sixth Form. Girls learn not just to speak fl uently, but to be heard. T ey prac- tise the art of listening, disagreeing respectfully and asking incisive ques- tions. T e goal isn’t performance for performance’s sake but fl uency, curi- osity and confi dence. Listening yes, but being listened to all the more.


Running in parallel, Surge, the


school’s new entrepreneurship pro- gramme, off ers Sixth Formers a practical introduction to start-up thinking. At sessions led by female founders, brand strategists and in- vestors, students explore how to turn an idea into something people believe in. T ey work through real-world con- cepts like product-market fi t, brand storytelling, ethical disruption and how to pitch with conviction. Surge off ers far more than a crash


course in business; it’s a purposeful intervention, designed to challenge the systemic barriers that still limit women’s success in entrepreneur- ship. It’s a direct response to stubborn statistics: in 2023, less than 3% of UK venture capital funding went to all-fe- male founding teams2


. NLCS isn’t


waiting for that to change — it’s pre- paring its students to change it. What connects Surge and Raising


Voices isn’t just ambition, but the be- lief that voice and value go hand in hand. To lead, girls must feel entitled to be heard and equipped to hold the room once they are. What are often labelled ‘soft skills’


are, in reality, the bedrock of lead- ership, now essential for navigating complexity, infl uencing others and making ideas heard. NLCS is one of the UK’s leading


independent day schools for girls aged four to 18, off ering a seamless educational journey from Reception through to Sixth Form. Founded in 1850 to pioneer a rigorous education for girls, it continues to innovate, en- suring its students leave not only well educated, but well prepared to make waves in the world beyond.


nlcs.org.uk instagram.com/nlcs1850 linkedin/schools/nlcs


1. EXPLORE-EDUCATION-STATISTICS.SERVICE.GOV.UK/FIND-STATISTICS/KEY-STAGE-2-ATTAINMENT/2023-24/, LITERACYTRUST.ORG.UK/RESEARCH-SERVICES/RESEARCH-THEMES/LITERACY-AND-GENDER/ & EDUTOPIA.ORG/BLOG/GENDER-EQUITY-CLASSROOM-REBECCA-ALBER/ 2. BRITISH-BUSINESS-BANK.CO.UK/SITES/G/FILES/SOVRNJ166/FILES/2022-11/UK_VC_AND_FEMALE_FOUNDERS_REPORT_BRITISH_BUSINESS_BANK.PDF


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