[4][5] With the foundation of the School of S. Anne, Nathaniel Woodard's project to provide education for the middle classes was extended to girls.

These friends eventually prevailed upon Woodard and secured his blessing and his enormous fund-raising skills to found the School of S. Anne in 1874.

Alice Mary Coleridge, Lowe's sister-in-law and adopted child, played a central role in the evolving vision that led to the foundation of the school.

Alice Coleridge, who had been greatly influenced by Anna Sewell and her godmother, Charlotte Mary Yonge, became Lady Warden of S. Anne's in 1878 and instituted a spartan regime and a broadly based curriculum.

As a result, the School of S. Mary was founded in Abbots Bromley in 1880 to educate more cheaply 'the daughters of clergymen and other professional men of limited means and of the agricultural and commercial classes generally'.

[9] This was due both to falling pupil numbers[10] and longstanding financial problems,[4] requiring the parent Woodard Group to inject £2 million of emergency funding to prevent bankruptcy.

As a result, in September 2019 the Woodard group announced the land would be sold by Savills and no further talks would be held on reopening the school.

Roch House Preparatory School in 1991 took on extra staff based in an upstairs corridor near Reed Hall with a classroom for UII girls.

The pupils processed to the Parish Church of St Nicholas, down the centre of the High Street, in height order wearing white veils ("hoods" unofficially called "tea-towels") fringed with light blue, carrying embroidered banners and singing (unaccompanied) the hymn "Jerusalem my happy home".