The school was founded in 1917 as a girls' grammar school, known as Sydenham County Grammar School for Girls. London County Council commissioned Basil Spence & Partners, in the early 1950s, to design additional accommodation to allow the school to increase capacity from 600 to 1140 students and to merge with Shackleton School to become a comprehensive school. This took place in 1956 on completion of the new six-storey, E-shaped, classroom block, on which work had begun in 1954. The official opening ceremony took place on 28 February 1957.[1]
In 2003 Sydenham School was granted Specialist Science College status and in 2008 it was granted Specialist in Mathematics by the DfES. Sydenham School has close ties to Forest Hill School, a nearby boys' comprehensive school.
Form system
In each year there are 8 tutor groups, named for the letters in SYDENHAM.
Admissions
The current headmistress is Ms Emma Wijnberg. It has always been a girls' school. Forest Hill Pools and Forest Hill library is next door.
Academic performance
In the last OFSTED inspection, Sydenham School was graded as 'good with outstanding features '. It gets GCSEs and A levels above the England average.(64%)
Notable former pupils
This article's list of alumni may not follow Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Please improve this article by removing names that do not have independent reliable sources showing they merit inclusion in this article AND are alumni, or by incorporating the relevant publications into the body of the article through appropriate citations.(November 2016)
Katie Brayben, Olivier Award Winner 2015 and 2023 Best Actress in a Musical.
^Chaudry, Ziad (1 June 2009). "Danvers beats Olympic champion". Your Local Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 June 2023. Retrieved 8 June 2023. "It was a good performance for me," said Danvers, a former St Leonards Streatham and Sydenham school pupil and the daughter of Brixton's former English Schools sprint hurdles champion Don Danvers.
