West Heath Girls' School

Philip Bennet Power and his wife, Emma, undertook the education of their own daughters at their Abbey Wood home, West Heath House.

The quality of the girls' education attracted other local families to ask the Powers to teach their children and West Heath School thus opened in 1865.

[1][3] The development of nearby shops and housing prompted a second move, Ham having become "too suburbanised for a high class girls' school".

[3] In 1932 the school moved to its final site, the 18th-century Ashgrove House, near Sevenoaks, the former home of the Elliot family.

The larger premises allowed the school to grow from its previous capacity at Ham of about seventy boarders, to over one hundred by the end of the Second World War.