The six houses are named after notable women in history and each have a corresponding colour: Bronte is blue, Curie is green, Nightingale is purple, Pankhurst is yellow, Teresa is red and Rosa is orange.

Pupils are introduced to a wide range of subjects from Year 7, including Computer Science, Art, Music and Drama.

The Tower Block: Humanity subjects, Religious Studies, History and Geography are taught here, as well as Classics and Latin.

The Modern Foreign Languages Building: Known as the MFL Block, French, Spanish and German are taught here, although the Music teaching and practice rooms and also one physics laboratory are attached to it.

In 2008, Dr Challoner's High achieved the best A Level results of any Buckinghamshire state school with an A/B pass rate of 84%.

[citation needed] The Politics department won the top prize, achieving the best A Level results of any school in England for the period 2004–06.

In addition to its academic success, the school has a proud reputation for sporting success, recently winning the national U16 basketball title and the tennis team were national runners-up in the year 8 and under Nestle School Teams Tennis competition.

In 2010 the school also entered a new competition at SOAS and in the recent past several girls have participated in trials for the England team.

In February 2008 a Challoner's team won the regional round of the Oxford Union schools' competition.

The school's record in the Oxford competition in particular is excellent; with at least 1 team breaking to finals day almost every year.

The pair also made it through to the semi-final of the Durham University schools' competition finishing in 7th place overall from over 100 teams.